Don’t be fooled by appearances. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra may look a lot like last year’s S22 Ultra but there have been big changes on the phone. It doesn’t help to change the design every year, so Samsung has retained the outer shell but that’s about it. The performance delivered by a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset makes it the best Android phone you can purchase at the moment while the camera system has improved by leaps and bounds. Plus, it offers four years of OS updates and five years of security updates. We have already written about what the camera is capable of. Here are nine features on the phone that make it deserving of the ultra moniker. Some of the features are not S23 Ultra exclusive but they certainly make the phone versatile.
REMOVE A SUBJECT FROM A PHOTO
The feature has been available on the iPhone 14 series for some months and now it’s available on the Galaxy S23 Ultra phone. You have to find an image that has as subject something you can extract from a bigger image. Try a picture that’s not too busy. Touch and hold the subject, give it a few seconds, release your finger and save it as an image. Go back to the gallery and you will see the extracted photo.
CREATING YOUR FAVOURITE FILTER
Do a Google search for the filter that you want. Go under images to look for an example of the filter you are looking for. Save the image to the phone. Dive into the gallery to find an image that you want to apply that filter on. Go into the editor by tapping on the pencil icon and then go into the filter section by tapping on the three little circles on the bottom. Tap the plus symbol, tap create filter and go into your recent photos to find the image that you just downloaded. Rename it to the filter that you have downloaded. Your chosen picture will take the colours and the gradation from the image you have downloaded and then applies it to the image you’re editing.
PRO MODE ON THE FRONT CAMERA
So far Pro mode has been limited to rear cameras. Now you can shoot a professional photo of yourself on the S23 Ultra, changing white balance, ISO shutter speed and so on. And front-facing videos can also be shot using Pro mode. Simply attach a wireless mic and then shoot in 4K. This is a big step up for vloggers. The front camera is 12MP but it comes with a new sensor, which gives crisper and colour-accurate selfies.
The S Pen remains a big part of Galaxy S23 Ultra
AUTOMATICALLY CREATE CONTENT
Inside the gallery app you can do a lot by just selecting a few clips or photos. You can create collages, remixes and several other things at the click of a button. Go into the gallery app on your phone and you can do this using one of two ways — you could stay under the pictures tab which has all of the photos and videos located on your phone or you can do it under albums where it has individual albums that you’ve created. Select a few photos and then add a couple of videos. Tap on the create button on the bottom left. It’s going to give you a few choices — Highlight Reel, movie, GIF and collage. Say, you are doing a Highlight Reel… it’s going to use AI and process everything. Select the filter and then play through the video. It’s going to stitch everything together. If you’ve trimmed your clips and you’ve shot in the same aspect ratio, the output can be posted at once.
VIEW METADATA
At times it’s important to see the metadata saved in each photo and video. It’s the information that’s relevant to that photo and video, like the device used to take the photo, time and date, location it was taken and where that photo or video is saved on your phone, and so on. You can edit most of the metadata. Pull up a photo and swipe up to view the details. Tap on edit to tackle some of the data, such as the time and date, rename the photo and adjust the location.
CONVERT VIDEO TO GIF
Inside the gallery app, pull up a video. Tap on the three little dots at the bottom right, tap on open in video player. If you are doing this for the first time, you will be prompted to download the video player. Go ahead and open it up and you will see a different interface. In the top left there is GIF. Select a portion of the video or the entire video and then adjust the speed of the GIF. When you are happy with the results, tap save and it will get saved to the camera app.
Video capabilities have been improved greatly on the Galaxy S23 Ultra
EXTRACT PICTURES FROM 8K VIDEOS
Shooting in 8K on the S23 Ultra is a pleasure and it has improved drastically. The best use case scenario of using 8K for me is to extract photos. Choose an 8K video and the resolution will be 4,320 by 7,680 and it’s at 30 frames per second.Scrub to the frame you like. You can extract a picture by tapping on the little box in the bottom left corner. Now visit gallery and you will find the image, which will be quite heavy, allowing you to crop in without any distortion.
LIGHTROOM INTEGRATION
Inside the camera app, choose “more” and then tap on Expert RAW.Once the interface is pulled up, you will see that you are capturing at 50MP and 16-bit RAW. Go ahead and capture an image. Pull up the photo and you will see it appears in a separate editor with Lightroom on the bottom of the screen. If you tap on that, it’s going to import that photo into Lightroom, allowing you to do all the tweaking.
AUTO SHARE TO PC OR TABLET
When you are using photos in RAW mode, you would like to transfer the files quickly to your laptop and it helps to have a Galaxy Book. Inside Expert RAW, there is an option that reads “auto share to PC or tablet”. Toggle it on. It will automatically send the pictures to a nearby Galaxy Book or tablet. The device you are sending to needs to be signed in to your Samsung account and have Quick Share turned on.