What better way to experience the Big Apple than with a Google Pixel in hand and a pro photographer guiding your way as you wander around Central Park, ice skate at Rockefeller Center, or eat your way through Chinatown? It’s only natural to snap pictures of, well, everything.

Once a month, Chris Maliwat leads Google Store visitors on afternoon excursions called Pixel Photo Walks, showing them how to use Magic Eraser¹ to focus on a family member or a favorite landmark, or Photo Unblur² to clean up blurry pictures. In NYC? Sign up for Chris’ next Pixel Photo Walk online. You can borrow a Pixel if you don't own one!

With his Google Pixel in hand, Maliwat kicks off his tours by meeting up with groups of up to 35 people at the Google Store in Chelsea. During the 75-minute tour, attendees learn how to transform mundane experiences – like waiting on the subway platform and riding the train – into works of art.

“Photography forces you to slow down and see beauty in everyday things,” Maliwat says. “The tours are about how to use your Pixel camera and frame a photo or get a good portrait. But they’re also about opening up your eyes to the world – and using your phone to capture those memories.” 

The subway platform is one of Maliwat’s favorite places to take photos and teach photography. “You have beautiful leading lines of the train, great lighting, graphic imagery, and great signage that rings of New York,” he says. “And of course, you’ve got New Yorkers.” In fact, Maliwat has combined both subways and Google Pixel in his book, Subwaygram, which features 75 mobile phone street portraits, all but one taken with a Google Pixel. 

Sometimes, the hubbub gets in the way. That’s where Magic Eraser comes in. It uses advanced AI to automatically identify certain distractions in your photo, letting you delete them with just a few taps.

One afternoon, a young couple from Toronto wanted to commemorate their first trip to New York City with a photo of themselves standing in front of a subway car at the very moment the doors opened. The catch? They didn’t want anyone else in the background.

“Prior to having Magic Eraser, I would have told them to wait until 3 AM, when there would be fewer people in the station,” Maliwat says. Instead, he showed them how to easily remove commuters from the photo with Magic Eraser. All they had to do was draw a circle around someone in the frame, then let Pixel remove them and seamlessly fill in the space. “You can create what appears to be an empty station with just these two people and the train,” he says. “Magic Eraser gives a more serene quality, and more focus.”

Magic Eraser helps keep photos focused on what’s important – the tour attendees in Maliwat’s class, not stray objects in the background. After the tour, if anyone notices a backpack, elbow, or piece of trash in the frame, they can do what Maliwat taught them: Open the image in Google Photos, circle the object with Magic Eraser, and poof, it vanishes.

In a dimly lit subway car, there’s another challenge: getting enough light to keep images sharp.

Photo Unblur refines the details and edges in photos, ensuring every part of the images – subway poles, seats, and people – can be seen clearly. Powered by the Google Tensor chip, Photo Unblur uses machine learning and facial recognition to clarify facial features. So when one of Maliwat’s regular tour attendees, an older man with a knack for sitting still, looked fuzzy in his images, Maliwat used Photo Unblur to create a pristine subject. Simply open the Photos app, tap a blurry photo, and click the Unblur feature. 

“It’s as if the subway wasn’t moving,” Maliwat says about Photo Unblur. “The feature isn’t about trickery. It enhances images and makes them more natural.”

Listen to an interview with a Google project manager on the Made by Google podcast to learn more about the science behind these features.

In NYC? RSVP to Chris’ next Pixel Photo Walk here.