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Adobe and Samsung have teamed up to ease the pain of advanced smartphone photography on the new Samsung Galaxy S23, S23 Plus and S23 Ultra Phone(s. Smartphones will exclusively use Adobe’s Lightroom software to handle the raw format photos that pros and enthusiasts prefer.
Most of us are fine with old JPEGs and HEIC, the formats phones use to store photos. But the raw photos, stored in the Negative digital formatDNG, that Adobe inventedprovide better image quality and more editing flexibility when you want to change exposure, color balance, sharpness, and other factors.
The problem is that raw files are also a pain to manage, which is why the Samsung-Adobe partnership – revealed exclusively to CNET – is remarkable. Once you have taken a picture with Samsung’s Expert Raw camera appyou can open them directly in Lightroom with a single click, the companies said.
Although Lightroom doesn’t come pre-installed on phones, a prompt will encourage people to install it, after which Lightroom will be the default raw photo editor, said Stephen Baloglu, chief photography marketing officer at Adobe. The phone version of Lightroom can be used for free, but a $10 monthly subscription unlocks some premium features and syncs photos with laptops. Samsung phones will come with a two-month free trial of Lightroom.
Partnership shows growth advanced smartphone photography maturity. Early smartphones had useful but not impressive cameras, but now they’re good enough to replace traditional cameras for most people, and camera technology is a major selling point for smartphones. This is why the The Galaxy S23 Ultra comes with a 200-megapixel sensorand why taking raw photos has become important to getting the most out of handheld gear.
Smoothing out bumps is important to unlocking this power. When shooting raw, there are a lot of difficulties. For example, even though Google helped pioneer the technology by adding DNG format support to Android years ago, the Google Photos app warns you of “limited raw support” if you try to to modify.
Adobe’s mobile version of Lightroom offers advanced features including, from left to right, color grading to fine-tune colors; the ability to sketch the elements you want to remove from a photo; and AI-powered selection tools to make it easy to edit subjects in a photo while leaving the background unchanged.
Adobe
Lightroom can correct optical issues such as distortion with specific lenses, and Adobe has worked with Samsung to provide lens corrections for all Galaxy S23 front and rear lenses, Baloglu said. Adobe has also done this in the past with older Samsung phones, as well as iPhones and other smartphones.
Adobe’s Lightroom is especially good for raw photos. On traditional high-end cameras like DSLRs and mirrorless models, this means capturing data directly from the image sensor without all the processing necessary to “bake” it into a compact, easily shared JPEG.
On phones, however, the image sensors are smaller and the image quality isn’t as good. Smartphones compensate with computational photography techniques that merge multiple frames into a single photo. This can dramatically improve a photo’s dynamic range – the extent of light and dark elements in a scene – to improve image quality.
New phones from Google, Apple, Samsung and others come with raw compute technology that does some of this processing but outputs DNG. This balances the flexibility of raw photos with the power of computational photography.
One of the new tricks of Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is using AI technology to reconstruct fine details in photos taken at full 200-megapixel resolution. This is necessary because the phone’s Isocell HP2 sensor uses pixel clustering technology which combines pixels into 4×4 groups that only capture a single color each. Groups of 16 pixels are good for low-light photos but complicate things in high resolution.
“We are thrilled to see Samsung’s continued innovation to deliver awesome photographic experiences,” Baloglu said.
Since Lightroom syncs photos, Samsung S23 phone owners can get their raw photos on the new Samsung. Galaxy Book 3 Ultra and Pro Laptops – or for that matter, on any Mac or Windows PC. On newer Samsung PCs, however, Lightroom will come with a free two-month Lightroom subscription offer.
