It’s getting harder and harder to squeeze more performance out of your phone’s camera hardware. That’s why companies like Google are turning to computational photography: using algorithms and machine learning to improve your snaps. The latest research from the search giant, conducted with scientists from MIT, takes this work to a new level, producing algorithms that are capable of retouching your photos like a professional photographer in real time, before you take them.

The researchers used machine learning to create their software, training neural networks on a dataset of 5,000 images created by Adobe and MIT. Each image in this collection has been retouched by five different photographers, and Google and MIT’s algorithms used this…

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