Google has made a small change with its Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G that had gone unnoticed until the brand added a new blog post that discovers it. The reason for this subtle change is related to preserving the mental health of the users (quite unbalanced by itself, we add).
Google is disabling the beautification or retouching feature for selfies on its new smartphones by default. Starting with the Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5, the manufacturer’s camera app will now provide more information to those who use the feature to enhance self-portraits taken with the front camera.
Do selfies drive us crazy? A little, yes
This novelty, designed to preserve our mental health , will be expanded by the rest of Google phones through an upcoming update, which will provide users with icons and labels that explain which retouching functions the application wants to apply and why. With this update, the application will also describe the characteristics of the selfies that you want to modify, be it “skin texture, tone of dark circles and brightness of eyes”. The user can choose to accept these retouching or take the photo without them.
The measure aims to provide greater transparency for users , showing a real version of their face, a vision without any modifications of themselves. This, in turn, promotes better mental health as google has conducted a study where it has found that the use of these filters can lead people to have an unreal image of themselves.
We set out to better understand the effect that edited selfies can have on people’s well-being, especially when filters are turned on by default. We conducted several studies and spoke with child and mental health experts around the world, and found that when you don’t know that a camera or photo app has applied a filter, photos can have a negative impact on mental well-being .
The feature does not appear to be intrinsically connected to any new hardware on the new Pixel phones so it is quite likely that it will end up on other phones, not as a way for users to stop using beauty or color filters on their photos, but to give them the opportunity to have more control over capturing our self-portrait and lose the fear of seeing ourselves as we really are.
We leave it for a future update to prevent some unthinking minds from putting their lives at risk by taking selfies in dangerous places .
