Exclusive: This is the HONOR Magic 7 Pro's new camera tech that makes everyone look their best

The HONOR Magic 7 Pro is due to launch in just a few days, and it’ll come as no surprise that photography capabilities will be a key part of the upcoming announcement. Thanks to exclusive hands-on access from HONOR, we can tease a little about one of the phone’s most exciting new features — AI-enhanced Portrait Photography.

The industry isn’t exactly short of AI-powered features right now, both in the camera space and elsewhere. However, if you’ve spent any time snapping your loved ones in recent weeks, even with recent premium smartphones, you’ll probably be all too aware of difficulties capturing absolutely spot-on skin textures, sharp details in low light, and that pleasing blend of light and shadow that keeps my mirrorless firmly on my hip. It’s those very problems that HONOR’s Magic 7 Pro and its new Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model aim to solve.

What on earth is a Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model? Well, instead of the large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini that are trained predominantly on and used for text, HONOR’s Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model has been trained for photography on over one million image samples with varying degrees of light and shadow. The 1.3 billion-parameter model runs entirely on the phone’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is an impressive feat in its own right. This makes it quite a bit different from what we’ve seen on the market so far, where AI imaging upgrades are often cloud-based and mostly used for removing unwanted photobombers rather than improving the image itself.

Not that you’ll notice any performance limitations; simply snap a pic and wait no more than a few seconds for the model to enhance the photo via the Gallery app, data connection or none. The fact that you don’t have to transmit your face over the internet to benefit is the most obvious perk. Also, as AI improvements are calculated post-snap, it has the added benefit of allowing you to shoot as many pictures as you like interrupted. There’s no waiting around for processing to finish before you can grab the next moment — something anyone who’s tried to photograph an unsteady toddler will appreciate.

So, what exactly do HONOR’s AI-enhanced portraits do for your snaps? Well, HONOR states that its model enhances dynamic range, optimizes the balance between light and shadow, offers better highlight recovery, can adjust skin tones and enhance the detail of hair and eyes, and can apply AI-powered software bokeh for a more gradual shift from foreground to background blur. Jagged edges be gone! That sounds like a very comprehensive set of tools, but from a user perspective, it’s as simple as pressing the AI toggle in the camera UI.

I gave it a quick whirl so you can see below a few examples of how HONOR’s approach to portrait photography compares to the renowned Google Pixel 9 Pro XL.

Compared to a Pixel portrait, the HONOR Magic 7 Pro definitely provides rock-solid subject exposure, a warmer white balance, and vivid skin tones. Eyeballing the fine details is also much easier, as the Magic 7 Pro provides a sizeable 48MP output compared to the Pixel 8 Pro’s 12MP. Cropping in, you’ll definitely see those fine hairs and an added twinkling in the eyes of our handsome Android Authority crew. The results are a little too heavy on the contrast for my tastes, but the added pop will certainly make HONOR’s portraits stand out in a social post.

For a closer look, you can see the results of the AI eye and hair enhancements side-by-side on the device as well. HONOR allows you to inspect a preview of the differences its AI algorithm makes to your picture, allowing you to keep whichever you prefer. See the examples below; the top is the refined AI image, and the bottom is the cropped original.

The results are definitely quite impressive, but clearly, there’s more than just upscale detail enhancement going on here. With millions of data points to back it up, the AI takes a bit of liberty to improve the image even further with extra detail, skin smoothing, and blemish removal. I quite like my new eyebrows, but this does further raise the question of whether we want our pictures to look as accurate as possible or to make us look as good as possible. I imagine that most consumers would be very happy with the latter.

Of course, HONOR isn’t alone in the AI-photography marketplace. Google’s Real Tone for Pixel has been around for years, for example, and does a reasonable job of ensuring robust subject exposure, as seen above. Then there’s the powerhouse Xiaomi 14 Ultra sporting the company’s Portrait LM AI technology to even out wrinkles and skin tones, adding another layer of goodness on top of a robust hardware package. But if HONOR can channel that level of image quality or further level up the experience with its novel AI enhancements, the Magic 7 Pro could be a real winner for photography enthusiasts.

We’re just at the start of seeing what on-device AI can do as it branches out from the chat-based large language models we’ve become accustomed to. The Magic 7 Pro is one of the first global smartphones to give consumers the opportunity to see if mirrorless-quality photography is finally within reach, thanks to AI. Stay tuned for the full launch in the coming days.