Samsung’s new app helps get more out of the S21 Ultra’s telephoto cameras

Samsung has released a new camera app in beta that lets you use Pro Mode across all four of the Galaxy S21 Ultra’s rear cameras. That means it’s supported on both telephoto cameras, rather than being limited to just its main and ultrawide sensors. The new Expert RAW app has been released in the South Korean Galaxy Store, but tipster FrontTron has an APK available to download if you’d like to sideload it. It only seems to be available for the S21 Ultra for now, on devices running Android 12.

The new app overcomes a limitation of the Galaxy S21 Ultra, which is that its stock camera’s Pro Mode is only available with two out of its four rear cameras (aka the 108-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultrawide, but not the 10-megapixel 10x telephoto or 3x telephoto). Pro Mode is an advanced feature in the camera app that gives you manual control over shooting elements like ISO and shutter speed and lets you shoot in RAW.

The app’s announcement post says the Expert RAW app can shoot in lossless JPEG and 16-bit Linear DNG RAW formats. GSMArena reports both produce images that benefit from multi-frame HDR processing, but that the latter offers the flexibility you get when editing a RAW image file. Just be sure to use an app like Lightroom to edit the DNG file because regular photo apps like Google Photos will strip out its HDR and other post-processing.

We’ve contacted Samsung for more information about the app, including when it might be made available for the S21 and S21 Plus or whether its features might eventually make their way into the stock Samsung app.