I was convinced my Google Pixel camera shoots dull photos until I toggled this hidden setting

I love using my Google Pixel 9 Pro XL as my primary camera phone. It's tough to beat as a dependable shooter for daily snaps and travel. It’s the main reason I stay locked into the Pixel ecosystem.

However, sometimes the colors in my shots don't look as rich as I envisioned.

At first, I assumed this stemmed from Google's default image-processing pipeline, which is similar to how it handles video tuning.

But after some experimentation, I uncovered the toggles tucked away in the settings menu that corrected the color profile on my Pixel.

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By  Jade Bryan Jardinico

Understanding the Pixel camera

Pixel colors can look a bit dull out of the box

If you're like me, you've mostly left the Pixel camera settings untouched, even after taking hundreds of shots.

That worked well at first. I still get impressive image quality, with high-level preservation across varying scenarios.

Yet as I captured more frames, I started comparing them side by side with my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, and I noticed the Pixel tends to produce pictures with smoother gradation and noticeably less saturation.

That's fine in isolation, but on social media platforms like Instagram, the snaps lack the punchiness I want.

Sometimes I need to cycle through each photo and enhance the hues and other parameters before publishing them online. That's far from ideal since I have dozens to hundreds of snaps to share.

Thankfully, a few tucked-away toggles add instant pop to my photos, and I wish I had flipped them earlier.

The camera feature I've ignored for long

Display P3 delivers the saturation boost my gallery needs

Before diving into the first feature to enable, you need to understand the color formats used across Pixels and the wider Android landscape.

Modern devices, like my Pixel 9 Pro XL, rely on two standards: the classic sRGB space and Display P3.

sRGB is the default across most devices and panels. Its main difference from the newer Display P3 format is a narrower spectrum, since it's an older space.

This means that with sRGB active, you see a more restricted color palette or range than real-world baselines.

The P3 standard addresses this limitation by extending the color range by roughly 25%, rendering deeper reds, richer oranges, and vivid greens that appear closer to reality.

Either format applies to both capture and display. Because of this, you need a panel that can properly display the P3 palette.

Newer Pixel and Samsung Galaxy flagships ship with P3-ready screens out of the box.

Despite that hardware capability, the out-of-the-box profile on Pixels remains the older sRGB format. Switching over to P3 will noticeably improve the vividness of your photos.

How to enable Display P3 format on Google Pixel

Flipping this switch made my photos livelier

You can check whether the feature is already active on your Pixel by opening the camera settings. Follow the steps below:

1. Open the Camera app.
2. Tap the gear icon to view quick controls
3. Tap the three-dot menu to open the full camera settings menu.
4. Scroll down, locate Rich color in photos, and turn on the switch.

Alternatively, go to Settings and search for "camera settings" to jump to the preference page.

When enabled, you will notice that shots taken in P3 carry much richer color depth.

Still, you may need a compatible panel to view that wide gamut properly on secondary devices or third-party apps.

There is virtually no trade-off, aside from needing a supported display, since the files store expanded color metadata.

Enable RAW mode

It keeps my photos natural

Turning on the P3 color profile isn't the only method to reclaim lost punch or fine-tune color accuracy across your gallery.

I've been testing RAW mode for some time now, and I found that many shots taken with it yield more vibrant palettes, especially across scenes with wide dynamic variance and textures.

Although RAW mode is primarily intended to preserve sensor data for post-processing, it also helps maintain natural tones straight off the sensor.

For instance, landscape frames preserve smoother gradations across skies and landscape textures.

As seen in the sample, the lighthouse's roof shows a brighter, cleaner blue than standard JPEG mode, which tends to crush darker tones while clipping highlight details.

It isn't a flawless workaround, as you will notice softer rendering on fine edges than the aggressive software sharpening found in JPEGs.

Even so, it remains a welcome alternative if you want to maintain the natural color, especially with deep color elements.

Another drawback of shooting in RAW is that it consumes more storage, since every press of the shutter produces both a JPEG and a DNG file, more than doubling the storage footprint per shot.

If you want to test it, enable RAW mode by going to Photo settings > Pro > RAW + JPEG.

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Your Pixel camera deserves better than default settings

These are the toggles I wish I had turned on the day I unboxed my Pixel, rather than trusting Google's default color science.

They instantly improved the color palette of my shots without forcing me to deal with annoying camera trade-offs.

If your Pixel camera roll has been looking flat lately, flip these switches or combine them with the other in-camera tools to give your gallery the punch it should have had from the start.

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