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) _Source: Based on reporting and hands-on guidance from ZDNET’s “I changed 9 settings on my Google Pixel to dramatically improve the camera quality” (Jason Howell, ZDNET)._ For years, the Pixel narrative has been simple: trust the auto mode. Computational photography will fix it. The sensors got better, the Tensor chips got smarter, and most people were happy to let Google’s pipeline decide what a “good” photo looks like. But the Pixel 10 Pro marks a quiet turning point—especially for technically minded users. Under a few layers of menus is a camera stack that behaves less like a black box and more like a constrained, mobile-native imaging platform. With the right settings, you’re not just taking better vacation photos; you’re reclaiming raw signal, dynamic range, and color latitude that Google’s defaults casually discard. If you build imaging software, ship Android apps, or just care about the computational side of photography, these nine tweaks are a case study in how much control the modern Pixel already exposes—and what it says about where mobile imaging is heading.

1. Full Sensor, No Excuses: Ditch the “Wide Crop”

The Pixel’s primary sensor is 4:3. When you shoot at 16:9 using the so-called Wide Crop, you’re not being cinematic—you’re pre-cropping. Vertically.

For any technically inclined user, that’s the cardinal sin: throwing away source data before it hits the pipeline.

  • What’s happening under the hood: the 16:9 framing is achieved by slicing off the top and bottom of the 4:3 capture, permanently losing vertical resolution.
  • Why it matters: every downstream operation—super-res zoom, sharpening, HDR, ML-driven enhancement—has less information to work with.

Switch to:

  • Settings → Ratio → Full Image (4:3)

Crop later in post, where you (or your tooling) control the trade-offs. This single change reframes the Pixel from a casual shooter to a sensor you can actually trust.

2. Rich Color: Opt Into a Modern Gamut

Rich Color mode enables capture in a Display P3-like color space instead of locking you to sRGB. For developers working with wide-gamut displays, HDR rendering, or color-managed pipelines, this is the camera finally acting like a first-class citizen in a modern color stack.

  • Upside: more saturation headroom in reds and greens, better tonality, more flexibility when grading.
  • Consideration: some non–color-managed apps and displays may show subtle inconsistencies, but for most 2025 hardware ecosystems, P3 is the right default.

Turn it on:

  • Settings → More Settings → Rich color in photos

If you design or test visual apps, this toggle alone is a reminder: your users’ cameras aren’t bound to sRGB anymore. Your UI and media pipelines shouldn’t be either.

3. Ultra HDR: Dialing in the Drama (With Caveats)

Ultra HDR pushes scene brightness and local contrast into a high dynamic range representation that looks electric on compatible screens.

  • Technically: think of it as richer PQ/HLG-style tonemapping plus metadata, layered over classic Pixel computational photography.
  • Real-world effect: more “pop,” more specular detail, but a higher risk of halos and a synthetic look in tricky transitions.

Toggle via:

  • Settings → More Settings → Ultra HDR

For content creators or developers targeting HDR-capable platforms, this is a native way to source HDR-first assets. For archival or documentary use, some may prefer the more restrained look of standard HDR to avoid artifacts.

4. Grid Overlays: Composition as a First-Class Feature

Grids are not a gimmick; they’re embedded guidance systems for both humans and algorithms.

  • 3x3 (Rule of Thirds) helps break centered, flat compositions and plan for vertical crops.
  • Golden ratio grids push users toward more “natural” balance.

Enable:

  • Settings → More Settings → Grid Type → 3x3 (or Golden Ratio)

From a product perspective, overlays like this act as soft constraints that improve the input quality feeding Google’s computational pipeline—and, indirectly, any ML models later trained on user-generated imagery.

5. Framing Hints: Sensor Alignment for the Real World

Framing Hints give you a live horizon and top-down alignment guide. It’s a small UX detail with technically meaningful impacts.

  • Why it matters: level inputs reduce the need for aggressive geometric correction, which can otherwise cost edge detail and introduce distortions.
  • For overhead/product shots: a properly parallel sensor makes your Pixel a practical tool for documentation, teardown photos, and UI shots.

Enable:

  • Settings → More Settings → Framing hints

This is the kind of assistive tooling we usually expect from dedicated cameras—now tuned to a phone most dev teams already carry.

6. Pro Controls: Pixels for People Who Don’t Trust Auto

Here’s where the 10 Pro and its Pro siblings (8 Pro, 9 Pro, Pro Fold) pull away from the base models. Pro Controls expose:

  • Manual focus
  • Shutter speed
  • ISO
  • White balance
  • Exposure and Shadows
  • Night Sight behavior

From the main viewfinder:

  • Tap the Controls icon → swipe through the sliders.

For engineers and creators, this is crucial:

  • You can deliberately introduce motion blur instead of having it “fixed” away.
  • You can lock white balance to maintain consistency between shots for compositing.
  • You can treat Night Sight as a configurable stack, not a mysterious long-exposure filter.

Google is effectively acknowledging a tier of users who want deterministic behavior on top of the computational stack—something mobile photography has historically resisted.

7. 50MP vs 12MP: Pixel Binning With Intent

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The Pixel 10 Pro’s 50MP primary sensor defaults to pixel binning down to 12MP. Most users never touch this—and they’re not wrong.

  • 12MP (binned): better low-light performance, smaller files, access to features like Top Shot and Motion Photos.
  • 50MP (full res): maximal spatial detail for landscapes, crops, and large prints, at the cost of storage and sometimes slightly slower processing.

Switch via:

  • Settings → Pro tab → Resolution → 12MP or 50MP

From a technical workflow angle:

  • 12MP is your optimized runtime config.
  • 50MP is your “debug build” for scenes where information density matters more than storage.

The key is understanding that “more megapixels” is situational, not a blanket upgrade.

8. RAW + JPEG: Dual-Track Capture for Serious Editing

RAW capture (DNG) finally aligns the Pixel with a professional workflow: one asset for instant sharing, another for serious correction.

  • JPEG: fast, processed, heavily influenced by Google’s aesthetic and tone mapping.
  • RAW (DNG): linear-ish data with far greater latitude for highlight recovery, shadow lifting, and color grading.

Enable:

  • Settings → Pro tab → RAW/JPEG → RAW + JPEG

The storage hit is real, but for critical work—client content, travel, product shots—this is non-negotiable. For developers building mobile editing tools, RAW support on mainstream Pixels should be treated as a core use case, not an edge case.

9. Manual Lens Selection: Ending the Auto-Switch Roulette

Auto lens switching is a blessing when it works and an unfixable bug when it doesn’t. The camera sometimes picks the wrong module for mid-distance subjects, yielding soft, distorted frames.

Manual lens selection fixes that.

  • Settings → Pro tab → Lens Selection → Manual

This turns the Pixel into something closer to a mirrorless body with discrete glass choices, instead of a heuristic guessing what you meant.

From a systems-design perspective, this setting is a quiet confession: context inference isn’t perfect, and power users deserve a way to override the model.

A Pocket Camera Worth Taking Seriously

None of these nine changes require root access, third-party apps, or obscure hacks. They are first-party tools intentionally shipped by Google, yet mostly invisible behind a couple of taps and vague labels.

Taken together, they expose an important shift:

  • The Pixel is no longer only “the smart camera that fixes things for casual users.”
  • It’s quietly becoming a controllable imaging platform tuned for creators, developers, and technical operators who think in terms of signal, dynamic range, lenses, and workflow.

If you work in mobile, ML, or imaging, treat this as more than a how-to list. It’s a roadmap of user expectations:

  • Users now assume RAW and wide color.
  • They expect HDR that looks intentional, not radioactive.
  • They want manual overrides when heuristics fail.

The cameras in our pockets finally have the headroom to matter to professionals and builders—not just influencers and families. The question isn’t whether the Pixel 10 Pro is good enough.

It’s whether the software around it, yours included, is ready to keep up with what its sensor can already see.