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Google Photos adds new filters to better reflect your skin’s ‘Real Tone’

The latest set of “Real Tone” filters in Google Photos are designed to help show your skin in its true shade.

With the Pixel 6 series, Google worked to adjust the phones’ camera to more accurately capture the wide variety of human skin tones, so that people can see their true selves in photographs. At Google I/O, the company released the Monk Skin Tone Scale, an open source library to help make machine learning of images more inclusive by better interpreting tones and shades.

At the time, the company announced that the Monk Scale would soon be put to use within the Google Photos app to offer specialized filters that tweak the skin tones of people in photos you’ve previously taken. As shared on Twitter, these new Real Tone filters are rolling out now to Google Photos users on Android, iOS, and the web.

Once the feature is live, you should have a suite of new options in the “Filters” tab of the Google Photos editor, with choices like Playa, Isla, Honey, and Desert. According to Google, the filters were specially designed to “work well across skin tones.”

If the filter you’ve selected is one of the new ones, you should see an overlaid mention of “Made with Real Tone.” Each filter should also have adjustments you can make, to deeply refine any given picture.

While the best solution is to automatically factor these color adjustments directly into the camera’s output, as the Pixel series has done, it’s great to see Google offering a way to improve the look of your previous shots for free. What better excuse to go through your favorite photos?

Image: Google

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Avatar for Kyle Bradshaw Kyle Bradshaw

Kyle is an author and researcher for 9to5Google, with special interests in Made by Google products, Fuchsia, and uncovering new features.

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