With four separate cameras nestled in its camera bump, the Galaxy S21 Ultra comes close to being a DSLR in your pocket, at least on the hardware level. Sadly it's always fallen short of that potential when it comes to software. The photos the phone takes are great, don't get me wrong, but the pro mode has always been disappointing. Now that looks like it's all about to change, as Samsung releases its new Expert Raw camera app.
Samsung's pro mode already offered users plenty of controls, but it's limited to just the primary and ultra-wide sensors, which is disappointing when we're working with a phone that has all this incredible zoom hardware. To rectify this and test some new features, Samsung has created an all-new app: Expert Raw.
Once you open the Expert Raw app, you'll see an interface similar to the pro mode in the regular camera, with a few key differences. In addition to new things like a histogram in the top right corner, maybe the biggest change is the addition of support for both of the phone's telephoto lenses, something we've been asking for since the S20 Ultra and its Space Zoom last year.
Before we get started really digging into this release, there's one kinda important detail to get out of the way: Expert Raw is currently only officially available through the Galaxy Store in South Korea. Google hasn't done the best job of translating the announcement for me, but it's done enough for us to get a gist of what's going on beneath the surface, and that looks worth getting excited about.
First of all, Expert Raw will still use the phone's HDR to add some post-processing to photos and will save both a regular JPEG copy in addition to a multi-frame RAW file. This could potentially lead to a competitor for Apple's ProRaw, allowing us to benefit from that kind of software magic on the device while still maintaining the ability to edit images properly.
Samsung also talks about combining information from multiple lenses for better low-light performance. This details here are particularly garbled by the translation, but it seems that the company is testing new software processing to improve performance on the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses.
The weather is quite gloomy today, so I haven't taken any usable samples myself. Thankfully, Ice Universe has been playing around with the app, and you can see his results in the tweet above.
Once you've taken your photo, there's a shortcut to open it in Adobe Lightroom, where you can edit the image to your liking. Samsung has also included some preset profiles for importation into Lightroom, which you can download below:
All these features are being tested in Expert Raw, but the plan is for them to eventually come to the main camera app. In a way, this is like Good Lock for your camera, but with a more sensible name. Samsung says Expert Raw is supposed to be exclusively for the S21 Ultra running One UI 4, but some users have reported that it works on the S21+. And again, since Expert Raw is only available now in South Korea, you'll need to use the APK if you live elsewhere.