I won’t buy the Pixel 11 unless Google fixes its awful portrait mode

I used to love shooting photos on Pixels, but recently I’ve been feeling let down by the once high-flying series. While I have quite a few quibbles about Google’s latest entries, my biggest camera bugbear is undoubtedly the phone’s portrait mode — the results just don’t look good enough for me to ever want to frame my snaps.

Whether I’m grabbing pics of friends and family or trying to add some bokeh to a macro crop, there’s always some artifact or issue that sticks out like a sore thumb. In fairness, these complaints apply almost equally to Apple and Samsung, but as the Pixel 11 series is right around the corner, I’ve been jotting down my wish list for Google’s upcoming flagship. Number one: I really hope they can fix my lingering portrait grievances.

For a quick comparison, I’ve taken some sample shots on my Pixel 10 Pro XL, Fuji X-S10 mirrorless camera, and the OPPO Find X9 Ultra. I’ve stuck to 3x zoom, or about a 45mm focal length on my APS-C mirrorless, which all work out to about 70mm full-frame equivalent (the typical reference for smartphone focal lengths). Between the three, we have an ideal reference in my Fuji, what we’re dealing with for the Pixel, and the best of today’s hardware in the OPPO. Let’s dive in.

My complaints about Pixel portrait photography fall into two camps. The first is pretty obvious to anyone who has compared a smartphone portrait photo with a mirrorless shot; the bokeh is just all wrong.

Edge detection is an obvious issue that has dogged smartphones for years, even after Google spent years perfecting its computational photography algorithms. Even the best software algorithms struggle to precisely distinguish foreground from background, resulting in smudged hair, gaps in the bokeh, or objects outright floating if the scene is too cluttered. My Pixel is particularly egregious here, with rough edges where there should be smooth lines and regular gaps in the background blur.

You don’t even need to crop in on the shot below to see the issues. The Pixel 10 Pro XL produces horrendously jagged artifacts along virtually every edge of the snap. It also failed to put the wooden pole into the background correctly. I gave the phone five attempts at this picture, and this was the best one. OPPO’s blur might be far too strong (this was just at the default f/5.0 software setting), but its edges are very smooth, and there’s even a realistic depth roll-off along the bench. It’s not perfect, but it’s really not bad.

Looking closer at the blur effect, both smartphones look unnatural to my eye compared to my mirrorless camera — they’re more smudgy than deep-looking. The Pixel’s effect resembles a very heavy Gaussian blur, and the light circles are too exaggerated and almost harshly clipped. With the Pixel, anything not immediately in the subject plane is also blurred by roughly the same amount, making the subject look as if it’s sitting on an artificial background rather than living in the scene.

The shot below shows the extremes of relying on software depth detection with a complex background. Neither smartphone nailed the focus and edges, despite five attempts each. The Pixel is clearly the worst, though; it failed to capture the flower stems and exhibits aggressive artifacts along the petals. It’s terrible.

The fact that better cameras have a proper 70mm-equivalent focal length for portrait mode really helps here, as it allows for optical compression and a natural element of blur to assist with edge detection before reaching the software processing pipeline. On that note, I could actually correct OPPO’s picture after capture by adjusting the software aperture effect in the Gallery app. Setting the aperture to f/16 essentially removes the added software bokeh errors and apparent lack of focus.

The Pixel has no such luxury; it combines pixel data from its 1x and 5x lenses to add detail and depth, but lacks the natural blur created by a proper lens. The end result is a much heavier reliance on software to fill the gaps. Worse, there’s no way to adjust or remove it once the photo has been taken. If the phone captures errors like this, you’re stuck with the shot.

Details that don’t stand up to inspection

This leads me to my second, but no less important, complaint about the Pixel 10 Pro XL: natural-looking details. Without a dedicated camera in the 2x to 3x range, Google’s computational photography can’t fill in the blanks when shooting cropped in portrait shots using data from the primary camera. It has to make do with some form of upscaling and/or computational pixel merging, but the results hardly flatter compared to the competition.

The end result produces additional noise, color banding, and oversharpened details, resulting in blotchy, rough skin textures and smudged-looking hair. To be fair to the Pixel, this isn’t always obvious when looking at full frame. But zoom in on any detail just a little bit, and it becomes glaringly obvious. Especially when placed side by side with dedicated portrait lenses.

Pay particular attention to the fine hairs, eyebrows, and other subtle details in the shots above. The Find X9 Ultra is every bit as good as my Fuji mirrorless, which is very impressive for a sensor a fraction of the size. The Pixel just isn’t in the same league; the level of detail drops sharply the moment you look closely at the picture. Worse, the irises of my eyes even loses its shape, appearing as wobbly blobs.

OPPO’s impressive detail capture is all thanks to its large 200MP sensor powering this 3x lens, which captures high levels of detail even in dimmer lighting conditions, such as the environment above. Again, there’s nothing to pick between them and my Fuji in terms of detail; the difference is mainly color science and bokeh.  By contrast, the Pixel looks incredibly rough in this low-light snap. Cropping in from its admittedly decent-sized main sensor and blending details from the smaller periscope camera just can’t close the gap. Looking at my hair, we can see those dreaded depth segmentation errors appear again, too.

Fine detail on the Pixel remains such a disappointment because portrait photography is all about capturing the subtle details. A twinkle in the eye or a crease in the smile is the difference between a bland and a memorable photograph. Having these fine details obscured or ruined by heavy post-processing is a photographer’s nightmare.

I’m eager for Google to address these portrait problems so the Pixel series can return to the top of the photography pack. However, I don’t see the Pixel 11 series improving things.

Based on the latest reports, any camera upgrades look set to be incremental tweaks to the current formula. Swapping out the sensors for newer models might improve the handset’s HDR and detail capture, but it doesn’t address the fundamental lack of hardware specifically designed for portrait photography — the Pixel’s biggest weakness in my experience. A 25mm primary lens will always be too wide, while the 113mm telephoto is too tight for natural face shapes and framing (and can’t even be selected for portrait mode on the 10 Pro XL). Ideally, a dedicated lens in the 50-70mm range is required, preferably with a large sensor and robust light-gathering and autofocus capabilities, but it doesn’t look like Google will introduce such a lens in its upcoming generation.

The prevalence of large 200MP sensors and 70mm telephoto cameras has propelled China’s Ultra flagships to the top of the mobile photography charts. They both excel for their impressive image quality and versatility, whether it’s capturing details at long distances or shooting portraits of friends, family, and pets. Google isn’t the only one sleeping on this trend; Apple and Samsung are also lagging behind with tiny zoom sensors and a dogged fixation on the wide-angle lens, as if a single, large primary sensor were the most important camera feature. At least in my opinion, they’re increasingly wrong on that front.

I hope the Pixel 11 Pro XL offers something more than just new software gimmicks for more discerning photographers. At the very least, it could aim to improve its dog’s dinner of a portrait blur algorithm, but I’m not holding my breath. Worse, it’s going to cost $100 more this year. Avid photographers like me might just have to skip it.