Recently, we covered a story where, as per Google Photos 5.18 APK teardown showed that Google will bring premium editing features. However, there was no confirmation whether it will be available only for Google One members or not.
But, a new story from XDA confirms that indeed the new editing features, including the filters, require the Google Photo user to have Google One premium membership.
In fact, according to XDA, the Google Photos Color Pop filter was locked behind a Google One membership. This confirms that in order to use the premium editing features and filters, users need to have Google One membership.
We expected only the new editing features to be locked behind Google One membership. But the reports now confirm that Google is already ahead in locking existing features behind Google One.
The Google Photos Color Pop filter works for images without depth information. It uses intelligent AI and separates the subject from the background.
Then you can use this Color Pop filter to change the color of the background, to either black or white or vice versa. This makes the subject “pop” out in the image, thus the name Color pop.
Other Google Photos editing features may be locked behind Google One membership
There is some good news and bad news. If you are using the color pop filter on images that have depth information (portrait shots), it will be available for free.
However, if the image does not have any depth information, and is a regular image, then you need to have Google One membership to apply color pop filter.
This has been confirmed by one of Google’s spokespersons to Engadget. So, as long as you have an image with depth information or shot in portrait mode, then you are free to use the Google Photos color pop filter.
Nonetheless, one filter is already locked behind Google One membership, we speculate that the other features may very well require you to have a Google One membership to use them.
Besides, this is not the only feature that will be coming to the Google Photos app. In our previous post, we have highlighted that the future release of Google Photos would bring preprocessing suggestions and a Skypalette feature.
The latter would help the users to replace the sky and edit them in their photos, if they have sky in their photos, obviously. The Google Photos app has already undergone major UI changes.
The app also picked up a monetization service that allows users to subscribe to a print service. This would send subscribers 10 high-quality photo prints each month for $6.99.
