There are so many camera modes and settings in Samsung’s camera app that it’s easy to miss many of them. If you’re one of those who just point and press but would like to make better use of the cameras, there’s a lot to explore, and here we’ll help you along the way with tips on hidden functions and explanations of some more famous ones.
We have started from a Samsung Galaxy S26 supplemented by a Galaxy S24 Ultra when we wrote this article. Older Galaxy S models and Galaxy A series phones may not have all of these features.
Change video speed with hyperlapse and slow motion
You can make both fast-forward and slow-motion movies with your Samsung mobile.
Slow motion is the mode in which you record movies where the subject moves more slowly than in reality. Hyperlapse can be said to be the opposite, here a series of still images are taken at longer intervals and put together to form a sped-up movie. You will find both modes when you select More from the camera modes.
Slow motion is probably already familiar to most people, and most of the settings, such as the ability to choose the zoom mode and photo lighting, are the same as for normal video. Special to the Slow-motion mode, however, is the ability to select the speed. The setting can be found both under the menu with the four dots on the right of the screen and in the upper edge opposite the trigger. There it says 240 or 120 and FHD or UHD. 120 and 240 are the number of frames per second, 120 gives half the speed, 240 a quarter of the speed. On older models, Samsung had a 960 frames per second super slow motion feature, but it has been removed. FHD means that the film is filmed in 2K resolution, UHD in 4K, but if you choose 4K resolution, you can no longer film in 240 frames per second, only with 120 frames per second.
Hyperlapse mode is a bit more difficult to use. You cannot choose the speed of Hyperlapse yourself, 5 minutes of recording gives 15 seconds of film approximately. For example, you can use it to film when you walk, or lean the phone against something and film as the day turns to evening. You can’t choose the speed as mentioned, but you can, however, speed up your movie further afterwards in Samsung’s gallery app. Open the movie, select the pen to edit and tap what looks like a speedometer. If you choose 2, the movie will be sped up to double.
If you press the icon with the four dots, you bring up the menu for settings in the mode, and here I think there are two in particular that are interesting. Partly the button that looks like a clock. Here you can set a timer on your recording so that the mobile can be set up and film without you having to come and turn it off at the right time. Firstly, we have the exposure time which shows a moving point. By default, it’s set to auto, and that’s also fine for most occasions. However, if you want to film clouds on a sunny day, you may want a short exposure time, and for a moving starry sky, a longer exposure time. When you drag the slider, the app shows suggestions for which scenes the different exposure times are suitable for, so you don’t have to remember which values mean what.
Choose the file format for your photos and videos
You can choose how the mobile camera saves the image files, which affects the image result.
Jpeg is the most used file format in the world. It provides good image quality while reducing file size through compression, and it works just about everywhere. But compression technology can today be classified as ancient, and we can do better. As standard in the iPhone, Apple has instead switched to the HEIF file format. It uses a more modern compression algorithm that both retains more of the image quality from the image content and gives you more compact image files. The only disadvantage of HEIF compared to jpeg is that the file format does not work everywhere. If you mostly look at pictures on your mobile, or send pictures to others who have iPhones, HEIF is preferable, but some programs have problems handling the file format. For example, it is fine to share a HEIF file on social media, while websites where you can upload an image do not usually support the format. On the other hand, it is easy to save a HEIF image as a jpeg directly in the mobile if it would not work to upload it. You go into the gallery app and select the image. Press the pencil to edit, and then on the three dots in the upper right corner, you can choose “save as jpeg”.
Samsung mobiles can save in both jpeg and HEIF, and what is standard may vary depending on the model you have. You can always choose yourself in the settings.
Tap the four dots in the camera app to expand the menu, and tap the gear to enter the settings. You can either find photo formats directly here, or you can choose advanced image options. If you switch off HEIF in the settings here, the images are saved as jpeg.
The same goes for video. Here, the files can be saved in H.264, which is older but has the widest support, or HEVC, which provides better image quality and smaller files. You will find the settings for it under the video format heading, in the same place where you select the image format. Converting a video file between file formats is messier than a photo, so here there is more reason to be conservative and choose the older format, but at the same time, there is more memory to be saved by using the newer image format.
There is nothing magical about the food situation
Samsung’s mobile cameras have a special mode for photographing food, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Photographing food and posting it on social media has been unreasonably popular over time, but at the same time there is a risk that the food looks unappetizing in the picture, it is not completely trivial to take nice food pictures.
Samsung’s food mode helps a bit, but it’s not like you automatically get great looking food photos with food mode. What food mode essentially does is make sure to keep what you put in the plate-sized viewfinder in focus, and superimpose a blurred background. If Samsung is to be believed, AI is also used to highlight the colors in the image that make the food look more appetizing, but on the other hand, the mobile camera in general recognizes the subject and adjusts the color and white balance accordingly. It doesn’t just apply to food in the food mode. It’s great to take pictures of things other than food in the food mode, and if you take pictures at relatively close range, most things turn out nice, thanks in large part to the artificially blurred background.
The pro mode
If you know cameras, the pro mode gives you more control over the settings.
Most people who shoot with the mobile camera probably just want to press the button and let the mobile handle the settings itself. But if you’re a camera enthusiast, you might miss setting the sharpness and white balance yourself. in that case, you can use the pro mode, which you can find by selecting More from the camera modes.
A mobile camera is not a system camera. It has (mostly) a fixed aperture, so you can’t adjust the aperture, but at least here you can set the focus distance manually, which is nicely highlighted in the subject in the app, and you can set the exposure time. You can also adjust the white balance and exposure compensation, alternatively choose the ISO number. If you don’t know what all that means but are curious, you can always experiment with the different settings. Anything you don’t set manually is still set automatically by the phone, so you don’t have to set everything manually.
Another reason to choose the pro mode may be to have control over which camera you use. For example, if you want to photograph through binoculars with the telephoto camera to get sufficient zoom, the mobile will happily switch over to the main camera when you try to fit the camera into the binoculars. This is because the automatic detects that the camera is blocked and switches when it becomes obscured. In pro mode, however, it remains locked to the camera you selected.
Pro mode is curiously not Samsung’s only pro mode, as there is also the separate Expert RAW app.
Expert RAW, Samsung’s second camera app
Expert RAW is Samsung’s camera app for those who want to shoot in RAW format, but even if you don’t, there are benefits to the app.
Samsung’s Expert RAW is a separate camera app, but it still has a shortcut in the regular camera app, among the camera modes under More. If Expert RAW is not installed, it will be installed on your mobile the first time you select it.
Expert RAW is quite similar to the pro mode in the standard camera app. For example, you choose camera instead of zoom level, you have a histogram that shows the light conditions of the image and you have a menu where you can change camera settings such as exposure time, white balance and more. But there are several settings here that are missing in the pro mode.
The main but far from the only reason to choose Expert RAW is if you want images in RAW format. RAW is the digital camera’s equivalent of the analog camera’s negative. In theory, it’s the raw content from the camera’s sensor. That image is neither enjoyable nor saved in a format readable by apps or web pages, and you end up with a very large image file. But if you like to sit in a photo program and process an image so that it turns out exactly as you want it, RAW is the best format because you get all the information that the camera delivered.
In practice, it is not really true that the image is unprocessed. Samsung’s RAW images consist of multiple exposures that have been combined to get less noise and more detail in the image, and then saved in the DNG RAW format. You can also choose whether the images should be in 12, 24 or 48 megapixels, and that is also a form of processing. But the truth is that the image is uncompressed and contains more data than the images you get out of the regular camera app.
In Expert RAW, you can choose whether the images you take should be saved in both jpeg and RAW, only in RAW or even only in jpeg. So you don’t have to be interested in the RAW format to use the Expert RAW app.
One reason for choosing the app may be precisely the 24-megapixel mode. The iPhone now saves images as standard in 24 megapixels, which is a really successful compromise between file size and detail. Samsung doesn’t have that option in the regular app, but in Expert RAW it does.
The Expert RAW app also has a series of lab features that feel more like testing new features for the regular camera app than anything related to RAW photography. Here, for example, there is an astro mode for shooting stars, and an astro portrait mode for taking a portrait with a star background, and an underwater mode meant to be used together with a waterproof case, where you can control the camera without using the touch screen.
There’s a lot to explore and discover in the expert RAW app, even if you’re not interested in post-editing images on a computer.