Two nifty Galaxy S22 camera features are now coming to older Samsung phones

Samsung first offered an object removal feature on its Galaxy S4 and S5 smartphones, with the function remaining dormant until reappearing on the Galaxy S21 series last year. The company has stepped up its game with the Galaxy S22 series, offering the ability to remove shadows and reflections in images too.

Samsung isn’t wasting any time though, as Android Police reports that these shadow and reflection removal tools are coming to older Galaxy phones. The new features are available as part of a Photo Editor update, rather than requiring a full-fledged OS update.

The feature is available as part of the Labs initiative within the Photo Editor app. You’ll first need to ensure that you have the latest version of the app as well as the relevant object/shadow/reflection plugins. You can check for the plugins by opening the Photo Editor app, choosing About Photo Editor, and tapping update.

You’ll then need to visit three-dot menu > Labs and then hit the toggles for Shadow eraser and Reflection eraser. You then need to go back into the editor, tap the three-dot menu again, and choose the Object eraser option.

Android Police reports that the feature is also available on much older devices such as the Galaxy S10 series and Galaxy Note 10 series, as well as mid-rangers like the Galaxy A52. We can also confirm that the feature is present on our Exynos 990-toting Galaxy S20 FE. The example in the gallery above shows that reflection removal isn’t perfect by any measure, but it’s still pretty neat to see.

The outlet adds that the feature requires relatively powerful machine learning silicon, which rules out low-end phones. Still, we hope Samsung optimizes these features down the line so that even cheaper A-series phones can get in on the action too.