6 Pixel 9 Pro photo features I’ve used on hiking trips

My summer is coming to an end, which means I’m wrapping up my hiking and backpacking trips. But I’m happy to report that I got out on the trail multiple times, enough to tide me over for a couple months at least! Better yet, I took my new Pixel 9 Pro with me and captured plenty of photos of my outdoor adventures. Here are six features I used to take some of my favorite photos from this summer’s trail trips.

Add Me was — without a doubt — the most useful Pixel Camera feature for all of these trips. During group adventures of the past, if no one was around to take our photo we’d struggle to position a phone against a tree or a rock, hit the timer and hope to make it into the group shot before it went off. This summer, I would simply snap a pic of my friends and then hand the phone off to a friend, join the scene myself to get an excellent photo of us all.

Plenty of times, I find that my trail photos don’t do the actual vastness of the landscape justice, or that I just missed the perfect framing because I was distracted or moving too fast. Magic Editor’s Auto Frame tool is perfect for a few of these images: It uses AI to analyze the layout of a photo you took and reframe the subject as well as expand its borders. It even shows you composition options so you can pick one you like best.

Super Res Zoom on Pixel Camera is one of my favorite features for landscape photos; it allows me to zoom in on the details of something far away and still get a sharp image. But sometimes only when I’m looking through my photos later do I wish I’d zoomed in more — thankfully, the new Zoom Enhance feature allows me to do this after I’ve taken a photo. This tool allows me to zoom in and crop an image, and it will intelligently fill in details, making the subject appear sharper and clearer — no graininess in sight. This is different from simply cropping a photo, which often results in a loss of quality.

I like some of the photos I take on these trips so much that I want to turn them into canvases or blown-up printed pieces that I can display — which is why I use Pixel Pro Controls to shoot in 50MP at least part of the time. Shooting in 50MP captures higher resolution images, resulting in more fine details that are important for large prints to look good. I also enable RAW, which makes the photo easier to edit later if I want. When you shoot in RAW on Pixel, it will take one regular, JPEG version and one RAW version. If you decide you don’t need that RAW version for editing but still like the photo, you can keep the JPEG, which is a smaller file size. (Plus it’s also fun to see the difference between the fully processed JPG and the RAW image.)

Photos from my excursions don’t always turn out how I remembered the moment. Sometimes what I’d thought was an incredible sunset is more muted than it’d seemed, or I forgot entirely to take a photo of a really beautiful meadow. Here, I thought I’d taken a photo farther down the river where the pine trees were tall and lush — instead, I took one in a more sparse area. Using Magic Editor’s Reimagine feature, I asked the tool to replace the bare trunks with “lush, tall pine trees.”

Evening might be my favorite part of a backpacking trip — for one thing, I get some truly excellent sleep after a day of hiking. But I’ll happily put off bedtime to watch the glowing sunsets followed by starry skies. I’ve used Pixel’s Night Sight feature to capture beautiful shots of these dark settings in the past, but now it’s available for panorama shots as well, so I can get an epic, wide field of view that captures the incredible landscape — even in low light.

Speaking of panoramas: Also worth mentioning is the new Panorama Mode, which delivers even higher-quality horizon-spanning images. Its updated UI made it easier than ever to follow along and grab each area of my surroundings, regardless of whether I accidentally tilted the camera — which is pretty easy to do when you’ve got a weekend’s worth of gear on your back.

Now that I’ve got these pictures, all I have to do is get my favorites printed — and start thinking about where I’ll take my Pixel next summer.