PhotoScan is definitely the star of the show, though. According to engineers from Google who showed the app to the press today, PhotoScan improves on the old "photo of a photo" technique that many now use to quickly get a digital copy of old prints. It's also a lot cheaper than sending pictures out to be scanned by a professional, not to mention faster and more convenient than using a flatbed scanner.

When you open up the PhotoScan app, you're prompted to line up your picture within a border. Once you have the picture aligned, pressing the scan button will activate your phone's flash and start the process of getting a high-quality representation of the photo. Four white circles will appear in different quadrants of the image. You'll be prompted to move your phone over each dot until it turns blue; once all four dots are scanned, the app pulls together the final image.

When moving the phone to scan each dot, the app is taking multiple images of the picture from different angles to effectively eliminate light glare — something Google cited as the biggest culprit in ruining digital pictures of photo prints. In practice, in Google's tightly controlled demo setup, it worked perfectly. It was easy to see how the lights in the room cast glare on the photo print and equally obvious how the app managed to eliminate it in the final scan. It's a bit of an abstract process to describe, but it worked as promised. We'll need to test it further outside of Google's own testbed, but the early results are definitely encouraging.

The app also lets you adjust the crop to remove any hint of the background surface peeking into the photo, but it's otherwise a pretty minimal experience. Once you're done scanning, the app prompts you to save your scans. They're saved directly to your phone's storage; you can then upload them to Google Photos or the backup service of your choice. Google specifically said that it wanted this app to exist outside Google Photos so people could scan images and use whatever service they want to back them up.

Beyond PhotoScan are some noteworthy additions to the proper Google Photos app. The biggest change here is that there are a host of new photo-editing options on board. The Google+ app actually used to have a pretty robust set of editing options, but when Photos was liberated as a standalone app, the editing features were significantly culled.

As of today, Google Photos for both iOS and Android now has an entirely redesigned set of editing tools and filters. The "auto enhance" feature, which tweaks brightness, contrast, saturation and other characteristics of your photo, has been improved thanks to the machine-learning technology that is at the core of nearly all of Google's products. It can look at a photo and recognize what a photo editor might do to try and improve the image. Auto Enhance has long been a solid feature, so seeing it continue to get smarter is definitely a good thing.

If you want to make further adjustments, the simple "light," "color" and "pop" sliders that were in the previous Google Photos app have been greatly expanded. Now, you can tap a triangle next to "light" or "color" to see a view with a host of more granular editing tools like exposure, contrast highlights, saturation, warmth and so on. Those tools aren't right in your face, so people who don't want to dive in can still make adjustments -- but those who really want to go deep on editing their pictures will surely appreciate the option. I used to be a big fan of the Google+ photo-editing tools, so seeing these features come back is very welcome.