Quick Summary
The new Snapdragon 8 Elite system on a chip, destined for 2025's Android flagships, has some clever camera features.
One of them creates a virtual ring light to make you look good in video calls.
This week Qualcomm showed off the latest, most powerful Snapdragon processor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and we know it's destined for phones launching very soon such as the Xiaomi 15 series. It's an exceptionally powerful system on a chip with serious AI processing power – and that power could be used to light up your life.
There's a fun and flattering new feature that the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers, and it could arrive in the next Samsung flagships, including the Galaxy S25.
The feature is called AI Portrait Video Re-Lighting, and it effectively creates a virtual ring light to make you look good in video calls. It works in real time and, according to Qualcomm, it's lag-free. It could therefore be the perfect partner to the AI features Samsung has already been putting into its Galaxy phones.
What does the Snapdragon 8 Elite lighting feature do?
AI Portrait Video Re-Lighting is designed to deal with overly bright backgrounds, which can make your face look poorly lit. It creates a virtual light source that can be moved around to deliver the most flattering lighting for your face, and you can set it manually or let the AI do all the work.
The system analyses the contours of your face to apply the lighting realistically; in demos, it appears to do exactly the same job that a real, physical ring light would do.
In a round-table interview at this week's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm's senior director of product management Judd Heape described another on-chip camera feature called Limitless Segmentation.
It breaks an image down into more than 250 different layers – layers for hair, faces, skin, objects, backgrounds and more – and enables those individual layers to be processed differently. That would presumably enable the portrait re-lighting feature to work with photos as well as videos.
On-chip features won't necessarily make it into finished phones; it's up to manufacturers to decide which features they want to implement in their devices. But with Samsung competing on its photography and AI, it seems very likely that we'll see these features alongside Samsung's own AI offerings in 2025.
