It’s a cliché for a reason: the best camera is the one you have with you. So I always felt that if you care about photography, your smartphone should offer the best camera available. I’m sure most owners of a Galaxy smartphone use it a lot for occasional shots and selfies. Quite a few will have been more aspiring “mobile photographers”, trying to squeeze the best quality out of the Galaxy S6 sensor. With the S6 edge+ this has become even more tempting.

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Samsung has always understood the camera is one of the main features of a high-end smartphone. So with every new Galaxy, the camera quality has noticeably improved, up to the point where you’d think there’d be nothing left to. But there always is, and the Galaxy S6 edge+ offers a “Pro” camera mode that’s far more elaborate than the previous one.

Why? With Samsung’s camera software, you could already make great shots with the usual options for white balance and choose macro if needed, you could set ISO and adjust exposure. With the new version of Samsung’s camera software, in the “Pro” version you can do much more, like choose shutter speed, and even save what you captured in the “raw” format – the digital negative so to say – at the same time. Both are major improvements and I’ll show you why.

First let me share a few tips how to get the best shots using the auto mode. This is where you don’t really have to think it seems, but there are a few things that can still improve your work. Like touching the display.

Dealing with light contrasts
Of course you’ll touch the button on the display anyway, to capture the scene you want. But with strong light contrasts – like with a bright sky – it can be very useful to touch the display on the brightest part of the scene: the sky will suddenly be blue instead of white.

By consequence, the rest of your scene will be much darker, but that’s easier to correct than a burnt-out sky. The software is very sensitive: you can also choose an area that’s a bit less bright, to compensate for the darkness you might want to avoid (like if you don’t feel like working on the result afterwards).

Also, there a small vertical slider on the left of the onscreen push button after you focus your shot by touching the screen – it shows two small lightbulbs. You can easily adjust exposure by sliding it up and down. As obvious as it may seem, I met quite a few users that never used the slider since they didn’t recognize it as such.

If you don’t want to bother about light contrasts at all and simply get just about everything in your shot, choose HDR in “auto” or “on” – you’ll find the option in the menu on the left side of your screen. HDR stands for High Definition Range, which means both the bright and the darker parts in your shot are treated equally. It tends to give a bit of an unnatural look, but it does really help to show just about all details in the scene in front of you.