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Adobe and Samsung have teamed up to ease one of the challenges of advanced smartphone photography. Samsung’s new Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and S23 Ultra phones use only Adobe’s Lightroom software to process photos in RAW format, a favorite of professionals and enthusiasts.
Most of us are fine with plain old JPEG or HEIC, the formats our phones use to store photos. Raw photo, digital negative format (DNG), the invented by adobeprovides higher image quality and more editing flexibility when you want to adjust exposure, color balance, sharpening, and other factors.
The problem is that RAW files are also cumbersome. This is why the Samsung-Adobe partnership (revealed exclusively to CNET) is noteworthy.If you take a photo using Samsung’s Expert Raw camera appcan be opened directly in Lightroom with a single tap, the companies said.
Lightroom doesn’t come pre-installed on phones, but users are encouraged to install it and Lightroom becomes their default raw photo editor after that, said Stephen Baloglu, Adobe’s chief of photography marketing. The phone version of Lightroom is free to use, $10 monthly subscription Open some premium features and sync photos with your laptop. Samsung phones come with a two-month free trial of his Lightroom.
Partnership shows growth Advanced smartphone photography maturityThe first smartphones had convenient but unimpressive cameras, but now they are good enough to replace traditional cameras for most people. Camera technology is the biggest selling point of smartphones. Galaxy S23 Ultra has a 200 million pixel sensorand why taking raw photos has become important to get the most out of the hardware you have in your pocket.
Smoothing out the bumps is key to unlocking that power. There are many challenges when shooting live. For example, Google contributed to the tech pioneer years ago by adding support for his DNG format to his Android, but the Google Photos app says “raw support is limited” when trying to edit. to warn you that
Adobe’s mobile version of Lightroom offers advanced features such as fine-tuning colors with left-to-right color grading. Ability to rough out items you want to remove from a photo. AI-based selection tools make it easy to edit the subject of a photo without changing the background.
Adobe
Lightroom can correct optical issues such as distortion on certain lenses, and Adobe worked with Samsung to provide lens correction for all front and rear lenses on the Galaxy S23, Baloglu said. Adobe has done this with previous Samsung phones as well as iPhones and other smartphones.
Adobe’s Lightroom is especially good for raw photos. For traditional high-end cameras such as DSLRs and mirrorless models, this means capturing data directly from the image sensor without all the processing necessary to “bake” the data into a compact, easily shareable JPEG. increase.
However, in mobile phones, the image sensors are smaller and the image quality is lower. The smartphone complements with computational photography technology that combines multiple frames into one of his photos. This greatly improves the dynamic range of the photo (the range of bright and dark elements in the scene), resulting in better image quality.
New mobile phones from Google, Apple, Samsung and others have raw computational technology that does some of this processing but produces DNG. This balances the flexibility of raw photography with the power of computational photography.
Lightroom syncs photos so Samsung S23 phone owners can get raw shots on Samsung’s new Galaxy Book3 Ultra and Pro laptops, or any Mac or Windows PC for that matter. However, on new Samsung PCs, Lightroom comes with a free 2-month Lightroom subscription.
