Samsung Camera Assistant lets you customize your stock camera app

Samsung’s Good Lock software suite allow people to customize their Galaxy phones to a greater extent than the standard One UI Android skin. We’ve already seen Good Lock modules for aspects like the lockscreen, sound settings, and the launcher. Now, Samsung has revealed a camera-focused module dubbed Camera Assistant.

The Camera Assistant utility was announced on Samsung’s Korean-language forum, and it allows users to make a number of changes to the camera app’s auto photo mode. Once you’ve installed the module, you’ll find a new Camera Assistant field in the camera app settings.

So what does Camera Assistant do?

For starters, the tool lets you toggle auto HDR photos and softening (to smooth out sharp edges and textures in photo mode). But you’ve also got a toggle for automatic lens switching, so the phone can automatically switch between cameras based on zoom, lighting, and other factors if you so desire.

You can also enable the ability to take videos by holding the shutter button in photo mode, and tweak the number of pictures taken after the timer runs out. Another neat touch is the option to output a “clean” camera app preview (without buttons or other UI elements) when connected to an external display.

Finally, one intriguing option is a “faster shutter” toggle that speeds up the shutter by capturing fewer frames. This could be handy for freezing subjects in motion, but Samsung does acknowledge that you could see degraded picture quality here. This downside is presumably because the camera app simply has fewer shots to work with for multi-frame image processing.

Samsung says the “faster shutter” toggle is only available for the main camera right now. However, the company adds that it’s aiming to bring the option to all lenses next year.

Unfortunately, the Camera Assistant will only be available for Galaxy S22 series phones running the Android 13-based One UI 5 skin (although support for more devices will come down the line). Samsung hasn’t launched a stable version of this skin just yet, but we’re guessing it can’t be far away if the company is launching an app that specifically requires this firmware.

Nevertheless, we’re glad to see this Good Lock module anyway, and we’re looking forward to future updates bringing even more interesting options to the stock camera app.