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For a while, Samsung has offered an augmented photo experience on Galaxy phones using the Expert RAW app. This gives users more powerful tools than the standard Samsung camera app, and it’s undoubtedly helped plenty of smartphone photographers get the most from their cameras. Well, the company just released a new update for the Expert RAW app, and it brings lossless photos.
If you are familiar with lossless audio, then you should understand the concept of lossless photos. After you take a picture, the image data is processed and compressed in order to conserve space. Lossless photos will skip this additional processing and save the RAW photo data to your phone as an image file. This gives users more flexibility when editing. Since smartphone technology has developed to the point where it’s encroaching on professional photography, this makes sense.
Expert RAW now brings lossless images
Samsung’s Expert RAW application is available for certain flagship Galaxy devices. You can get the app if you have a Galaxy S20 Ultra, Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold 2 or newer, or a Galaxy S21 or newer. You can download it from the Galaxy Store.
The company just pushed out the latest version of the app, which is version 3.0.05.12. It brings some additions to the application, and one of the major additions is lossless photography. To activate the feature, open the Expert RAW app, and tap on the Settings button. You will see the toggle for lossless photos near the top of the Settings screen.
After updating the Galaxy S24+ (Review) we have here at Android Headlines, we saw that the lossless image option was automatically enabled. That could be a bit of an issue, as we will explain later in the article.
One thing to note is that this feature is not guaranteed to work on all of your camera sensors. On the Galaxy S24+, you can use the feature in both 12-megapixel mode and 24-megapixel mode. However, you cannot use it in the 50-megapixel mode.
The issue
So, why is it an issue that this could possibly be enabled by default? Well, lossless images take up a lot of space. One image we took with the Galaxy S24+ in the 24-megapixel mode produced a file that was 38MB large. So, if you’re planning on going on an extended photo shoot, you could wind up using hundreds of megabytes if not a few gigabytes.
If you don’t see this option for your phone, and you have an eligible device, go to the Galaxy Store and see if you have an update available.