Samsung has released a new app that promises a serious upgrade to selected Galaxy smartphones.
The Galaxy S21 Ultra is first to benefit from Samsung’s new Expert RAW app.
Recently announced on Samsung’s community pages and available first for the Galaxy S21 Ultra, the Expert RAW app brings a range of new capabilities and significantly improved image quality to the smartphone’s camera, especially when using zoom.
As its name suggests, Expert RAW is designed to capture high-quality images in raw format similar to Apple’s ProRAW feature. The new app brings multi-frame-based raw shooting to all of the smartphone’s lenses and, significantly, adds a new ‘Pro’ mode to the telephoto lens.
According to Samsung, the telephoto lens typically lets in four to eight times less light than the main lens, making it much more difficult to capture high-quality images at higher zoom factors. This difficulty is compounded by the relatively small pixels typically found in the smaller image sensors typically paired with telephoto lenses. Now, advanced users can get much better-quality zoomed photos by switching to Expert RAW.
Samsung’s new Expert RAW app brings advanced manual camera controls to the Galaxy S21 Ultra, … [+]
The app includes support for 16-bit linear DNG raw files that can be opened in advanced image editing software such as Adobe Lightroom, and adds a high-quality lossless JPEG format. It also offers manual controls such as ISO, shutter speed, exposure compensation, manual focus, white balance and HDR.
A beta version of Expert RAW is currently available only for Galaxy S21 Ultra users running Android 12 with One UI 4. However, it is expected to reach other compatible Samsung handsets in the future, provided they have the required processing power.
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