

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.
Sign up to the T3 newsletter for smarter living straight to your inbox
Get all the latest news, reviews, deals and buying guides on gorgeous tech, home and active products from the T3 experts
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.
Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).
-
Luxury e-bikes are getting smaller, sleeker and smarter, and this $13,000 model is leading the way
With the featherweight EIDOLON, Ponomarets taps into a growing demand for subtle, high-end eBikes
-
Ferrari revisits an iconic name with its latest hybrid
Lighter, sharper, faster: Ferrari 296 Speciale is an even quicker hybrid
-
Samsung's flagship phones will reportedly maintain one key advantage over iPhone for the foreseeable
Apple is said to be struggling to match Samsung in a specific tech area
-
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge official prices leaked... by Samsung
The brand has leaked the price of its own device
-
New Samsung Galaxy foldable launch event leaked
This could be the date the Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 arrive
-
Samsung Galaxy S25 FE still on for this year, but one leak curbs our excitement
This is an odd choice
-
Expected Samsung foldables could arrive later than expected this year
It could be a late launch for these foldables
-
Apple's iPhone just did something it never has before
This is an unprecedented event for the iPhone
-
Samsung hits pause on Android 15 rollout, but your phone might be lucky
Your delayed Samsung One UI 7 software update could be delayed some more
-
Samsung Galaxy devices could lose a unique feature after all
That's despite recent claims to the contrary