The workflow is simple enough, for many hundred million
Samsung smartphone owners worldwide. Use the phone to take a photo, then tap on
the little thumbnail to bring up the photo just taken. Not quite right? Then
use one of the many supplied editing functions to crop, tweak, apply an effect,
and so on. Looks great, so delete the original to save space. Perfect! Except
that it’s not. Unbeknown to the user, the TouchWiz Gallery software has
massively downsampled the image too. Yep, we’ve just lost 75% of image detail/resolution.
It’s telling that no one has actually noticed this before (as far
as I can tell), given the astronomical number of Samsung smartphones sold –
perhaps it’s that most people really didn’t need the full 9 Megapixels (or
whatever, according to device) in the first place – certainly a 2MP downsampled
version of a photo is still a good match for most people’s monitors, TV screens
and, of course, phone displays. You could even argue that Samsung is doing
everyone a big favour, improving photos with the effects and editing requested
and also making the photos take up a lot less room on the phone’s internal disk
or microSD card.
But no. NO, I tell you, it’s just wrong. Lost detail is lost
detail. Three quarters of it!
An original 16:9 photo taken on the
Galaxy S4. 9MP or thereabouts….
For example, something I’ve done often on other phones and using
other software, you might take a shot of a group of people and then, a month
later, decide that one of the faces is really special and then crop in on just
that person. Starting with a full (e.g.) 9MP and cropping out around (say) 80%
of the image, you’re still left with 2MP resolution and you have the perfect
shot of the person you wanted.
A little auto-adjustment (or indeed
ANY other editing function) later in Samsung’s software and the photo is now
2MP!
Using Samsung’s TouchWiz editing solution, there’s a good chance
that you’ve already edited the image in question at least once, even to tweak
brightness or coloration – in which case, the photo has already been silently
(and criminally) reduced to around 2MP. Now snip out the person you want from
the example group shot and you’re left with0.2MP or so (and
no, that’s not a typo), blocky, pixellated and unusable on almost every
display.
Now crop out a person or some other
detail and – oh my, we’re down to only hundreds of pixels….
At this point, the user would scratch their head and wonder what
had gone wrong. After all, didn’t they buy this top end smartphone from Samsung
because it had a very high resolution ’13MP’ camera? Where have all the pixels
gone? Samsung has ‘eaten’ them, it seems. And without telling anyone.
Crop comparison from original image
and from scaled up ‘edited’ image in Samsung’s TouchWiz image editor…
Now, there are two obvious solutions:
- Don’t
delete the original of each photo. After editing in Samsung’s image
editor, leave the original alone and use this as the ‘master’ photo, from
which to start with for any future edits or crops. The problem with this
approach (and maybe it’s just me) is that you end up with multiple copies
of every photo, which makes the thumbnail views in the Gallery messy, to
say the least. And it’s not always evident which one is the
‘master’, without diving into the ‘Details’ menu option.
- Use
a different image management application. In fact, Android now has
something that Google-written and rather excellent, in Photos, the
break-out application from the Google+ stable. This is a nigh-on perfect
drop-in replacement for Samsung TouchWiz’s Gallery, and offers, if
anything, even more editing functions and more polish. The catch? There’s
no way to integrate a replacement like this into the Samsung Camera
workflow. So whenever you try and edit quickly from Camera, you’ll always
be thrust into Samsung’s software, whether you want it or not. And no,
there’s no setting to change this.
Neither are ideal, then. I suppose there’s another option, if you
have good enough connectivity and have Google+ set up to auto-backup everything
immediately, even over cellular data – in which case you’ll possibly have
a full resolution original to download from the Cloud. But, again, a little
messy.
The stock Android Gallery application (i.e. what you get on the
likes of the Nexus and Cyanogen firmwares) isn’t a slouch in the presentation
and editing front and doesn’t have the same downsampling problems, so it’s
quite clearly something Samsung has done, whether intentionally or
unintentionally.
Leaving me without any good news to end on, other than having been
able to educate the world as to what Samsung’s TouchWiz Camera/Gallery editing
functions are doing in terms of losing information from our photos. Is this
something Samsung can fix? Absolutely, though don’t hold your breath, large
chunks of Samsung’s UI seem to now be set in stone.
In the meantime, if you edit on your Samsung Galaxy device, make sure you
keep your original images!
Footnote: interestingly, there’s also a dedicated ‘Crop’ function
on the main menu of TouchWiz’s Gallery application – and this also downsamples
while cropping, but to a completely different degree to the
crop function in the main editing interface. Samsung is either being extremely
clever in trying to second guess what average users want – or its code is a
complete mess and the programmers don’t know what they’re doing. Comments?
Which one do you think it is?
credit:androidbeat.com
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