Buyers of the new phones unveiled at Galaxy Unpacked will have to use our Editors’ Choice photo workflow software to edit Expert RAW images.
Samsung’s Galaxy S23 reveal at its Unpacked event this week included a number of camera-related enhancements—a 200-megapixel mode, 8K30 video shooting, optical image stabilization, laser autofocus, and Nightography, just to name a few.
It also touted the Expert RAW photo file format used in the phone’s cameras. The feature is Samsung’s answer to the ProRAW format used in Apple’s top-end iPhones. Both formats combine the raw image data from the sensor with computational photo wizardry courtesy of the phone’s processing hardware.
For years I’ve been urging readers who are serious about good photography to shoot to raw file formats, because it gives you so much control when editing images after the shot, compared with using the JPG format. JPG is a compressed, lossy format that’s a best guess based on the sensor data for a final product. When you shoot in raw format, you get all the image data from the sensor, and in the case of Expert RAW, that’s combined with the phone’s image enhancements.
Not all photo software can handle all cameras’ raw formats, and that’s just as true of the Expert RAW format, which, by the way, supports 16-bit color depth, compared with Apple ProRAW’s 12-bits, for considerably more color information. It saves both JPG and DNG raw file formats. In addition to the after-shot editing possibilities shooting in raw adds, the Expert RAW app offers detailed photo settings like ISO, white balance, shutter speed, and exposure value (EV).
