Samsung’s Expert RAW app is an app dedicated to photography enthusiasts and people who really want to take their image-taking capabilities to the next level. Currently, the app is supported only on the Galaxy S21 Ultra as well as the newly-announced Galaxy S22 Ultra, but now XDA-Developers reports it will make its way to other Galaxy phones as well.
Expert RAW to be coming to more Galaxy phones
By default, most smartphone cameras save photos in JPEG format, but the RAW format images allow for more post-editing and are generally the preferred format to shoot in for photographers and photography enthusiasts. Samsung’s Expert RAW app offers support for RAW images, and it is currently available only for the powerful Galaxy S21 Ultra and the camera beast Galaxy S22 Ultra. It seems, however, that this will change soon and Samsung will be adding some more Galaxy models to the list of phones that support Expert RAW.
This information comes from a recent comment on a thread over at Samsung Community forums (in Korean). Samsung has announced that the Expert RAW app will be released on February 25 and will be made available for more Galaxy phones.
The post also states that before the app’s official release date of February 25, Samsung will be informing its customers of the final list of supported devices. Of course, whether your Galaxy phone will be supported depends on the AP specifications, as well as lens sensor specifications. So far, it seems only the top models will be supported, and not the budget-friendly ones.
However, the announcement does not specify exactly which top models will be able to install the Expert RAW app. We can speculate that the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22 Plus, as well as Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S21 Plus, could be getting the app. On the other hand, the Z Fold 3 and the Z Flip 3 might also be getting support for it, but we are uncertain at this moment if that will be the case.
Samsung’s Expert RAW app: what does it do?
The Expert RAW app supports HDR multi-frame capture, which means you can save shots in JPEG and DNG RAW formats. Basically, RAW images allow photographers and photography enthusiasts to have more control over the camera settings, including ISO (how sensitive the sensor is to light), shutter speed (which allows you to play with light for creative shots), white balance.
On top of that, you get histogram support, which is basically a graph that helps you determine how light or how dark a photo is and how many light and dark areas you have in your photo, as well as manual focus.
And that’s not all: Expert RAW has integration with the industry-leading Adobe Lightroom app, which allows you to tweak the photo you took’s setting to achieve the most desired look in terms of color, exposure, white balance, and many more aspects of a photograph. The app’s integration with Lightroom allows you to directly open your RAW files in the app for post-production.
The app has also gotten some helpful updates to its user interface recently, as well as some important bug fixes. With the latest update to Expert RAW, the app is sporting a new feature called High-Efficiency RAW.
The High-Efficiency RAW feature is pretty much a quite needed one if you don’t have enough space on your device, as RAW formats take a lot of space and are generally quite large files (they need to record a lot more information for a photo to give you control over white balance and the other settings we mentioned above).
Of course, High-Efficiency RAW will be downgrading some of the images in order to save space, so you would need it only if you’re really running out of storage on your Galaxy phone.
