How to shoot better photos with Samsung's Expert RAW app

With a pixel-dense 108MP main camera, a sweeping ultra-wide shooter, and not one but two zoom lenses, Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra has the most versatile camera system of any smartphone on the market. And while the default camera app that comes pre-installed on the S22 Ultra is easy to use and lets you take advantage of every lens, Samsung designed an additional camera app that offers even more granular controls over the imaging system. Whether you’re a professional photographer or just want to dabble in photo editing, the Expert RAW app is an excellent companion for Samsung’s epic Galaxy S22 Ultra system.

Expert RAW actually works for other recent Samsung premium flagships, such as the Galaxy Z Fold 4 or Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, but the app was practically designed with the current Galaxy S Ultra camera system, as it launched in beta form for the Galaxy S21 Ultra and made its official debut with the Galaxy S22 Ultra.

What does Expert RAW even mean?

The app derives its name from a RAW file, which is an uncompressed digital image file with little to no processing. In other words, a RAW image file contains all the image information your camera sensor can take in. This differs from typical JPEG (or JPG), which is a compressed image file using a universally agreed upon image compression format.

In modern smartphone photography, by the time you even see the JPEG in your photo gallery app, the image has already been processed heavily by the phone's ISP (image signal processor) using computational photography algorithms.

RAW files are significantly larger in file size (the Galaxy S22 Ultra's RAW photos are usually between 30-40MB per file), but it gives the photographer much more image information to work with in the post-editing process. To use a food metaphor, a RAW file is like getting a plate of raw ingredients. You can put together the dish you want however you choose. A JPEG image, meanwhile, is akin to being served a meal that's already cooked. It's ready to eat, but you don't have a lot of say in how it tastes.

Samsung, therefore, named the app Expert RAW because the software shoots RAW images and is aimed at "expert" photographers.

Where do you download Expert RAW?

The app does not come with the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra — or any other Samsung phone for that matter. It's also not available on the Google Play Store. Instead, Expert RAW must be downloaded from Samsung’s own app store, the Galaxy Store.

I find the Galaxy Store annoying to use; there are pop-up ads regularly, and the app seems to be manually updated every couple of weeks. Nonetheless, it's the only official place to get Samsung's Expert RAW app.

How to use Expert RAW

Open the Expert RAW app, and you'll be greeted with a camera interface that looks similar to Samsung's default camera app. Instead of various shooting modes such as "Portrait," "Photo," Video," or "Panorama" that fill the horizontal scrolling bar at the bottom third of the default camera app's interface, the Expert RAW app uses that row to house camera settings such as ISO (light sensitivity), Speed (shutter speed), EV (exposure value), Focus (Focus pane/points), and WB (white balance). These terms are all self-explanatory for anyone remotely into photography.

The viewfinder's upper right corner shows a real-time Histogram (a bar chart showing the distribution of light in an image), and the buttons to toggle between the camera lenses have more professional-sounding labels like UW (ultra-wide), W (wide), T (telephoto) and ST (super telephoto) compared to the standard camera app's 1x, 3x, etc.

As you may have noticed from the screenshots of a light bulb above, the default camera app exposes the light much more brightly than the Expert RAW app's viewfinder. This is Samsung's software trying to find the balance between illuminating the room and not blowing out the light bulb too much. Expert RAW leaves the decision up to you. You can choose to expose the light bulb and leave the rest of the scene dark, or expose the room and have the bulb look blown out. You can, of course, play with ISO and shutter speed to try to find the balance, but the point is you have to make the tweaks depending on the scene.

Images snapped in the Expert RAW app are housed in their own folder within the app and within the Samsung Photo app, mixed with "normal" JPEG photos. If you preview a RAW image in the Expert RAW app, there is an option to directly import the photo over to Adobe Lightroom for immediate editing on the phone. You can, of course, transfer the files over to a computer and use other photo editing software.

This set below is a good example of why shooting in RAW grants more control. The auto shot that Samsung's default app captured blows out the light bulb slightly. Once that light is blown out in a compressed or processed image, there's no going back. In Adobe Lightroom, no amount of fixing can make that light bulb not appear as a giant white flashing light. But with the RAW image, which exposed the light bulb but left the rest of the scene dark, I was able to salvage it in Lightroom by playing with the various sliders and eventually getting an image that brightens up the room a bit while keeping light bulb not blown out.

Playing with the various settings allows the photographer to change the mood and vibe of a scene. You can, for example, adjust the color temperature by making a scene appear cooler or warmer, as well as other shades of tint.

You can also separate points for focus and exposure. You know how in a typical smartphone app, you can tap on a portion of the photo to focus on that part, and it'll also brighten up that part of the shot? That's your smartphone focusing all its attention on the part of the frame you tapped. On the Expert RAW app, you can tell the app to focus on that spot but not make it brighter to keep exposure focused on another part of the shot. This is useful for a complicated shot like the one below.

You can see the JPEG image captured by the default Samsung camera app does a great job producing a very smartphone-looking image, with mostly great HDR (it does blow out the sky a bit, which is a problem with Samsung and Apple software processing), but the overall shot is vibrant and well-balanced. However, it also looks flat and over-processed, like many smartphone images. The RAW image looks a bit dull and gray, but that's before we apply our edits. The RAW file is 31.3MB in size compared to the JPEG's 5.7MB because it contains a lot more data. That means there's more room for me to adjust it in Lightroom.

With a few tweaks, I was able to get images like the ones below. Notice the natural bokeh due to manual focus honing in one specific part of the frame. You'll also notice some natural bokeh, with one shot focused on the camera, leaving the sky blurred out, and the other vice versa.

Generally, Samsung's default camera mode allows you to just point and shoot to get a good-looking shot. But if you use Expert RAW, it could be more rewarding as it allows you the freedom to play with how a photo looks and feels. In the below samples, I thought Samsung's default image processing is, again, too heavy on HDR. In the RAW image, I could add contrast back to the shot while keeping the flowers well-detailed.

Ultimately, Expert RAW is a fun tool to get more creative freedom over Samsung smartphone photography, but don't expect magic. At the beginning of the article, I called the Galaxy S22 Ultra the most versatile camera system on the market, but I didn't call it the best smartphone camera. That's because the S22 Ultra's image sensor size is relatively small compared to phones like the Xiaomi 12S Ultra. The latter's sensor can pull in significantly more image information. In other words, shooting in RAW on a phone like the Xiaomi 12S Ultra (which it can do, by the way) brings even more editing options.

Likewise, if you use Expert RAW with a lesser camera system, like the fine-but-nothing-special Galaxy Z Fold 4 cameras, don't expect to be able to do too much beyond changing white balance and focus points, as the image sensor doesn't bring in enough dynamic range to really offer significant latitude to tweak the exposure.

The Expert RAW app also has some noticeable shortcomings. It only offers controls for the four rear cameras, omitting the selfie camera entirely. It also can snap only still photos, no videos. Plus, the aspect ratio is locked to 4:3. Despite this, I still think Expert RAW is a fun tool for aspiring photographers or those who enjoy playing around with photo editing tools. Actual professional photographers would likely still scoff at the limitations of the mobile camera system. But hey, the app is free, so there aren't many complaints.