Blurry close-ups on the S23

[Discover]

Here at the Community, we’re quite obsessed with the cameras on the Galaxy S23. With a 50 MP main camera and 12 MP front camera, both enhanced with Super HDR to help you get the most epic shot. And Nightography’s enhanced AI brings out the details in low-light photos.

When you’ve been trying out the camera on your S23 or S23+, you might have noticed that, when you’re taking a close-up pic, the area around the object looks a bit blurred. This is because the rear wide-angle camera on the S23 and S23+ has a bright aperture, which helps when you take pics in the dark. But this also means that the more noticeable selective focus might make the background of your snaps look a bit blurred.

Samsung is planning to improve this with a future software update. In the meantime, if this is something you’re experiencing on your Galaxy S23 or S23+, there are a few things you can try:

• Try taking the photo from a bit further away; if the object you’re taking a pic of is about 30cm away, move back by a handspan
• Try taking the pic holding your phone vertically; if you’re holding your phone horizontally or diagonally, it might make the background look more blurred

If you’re using a Galaxy S23 Ultra to take a close-up photo, the camera automatically switches to the wide-angle camera and activates Focus enhancer to help prevent blurring. If you’re in High Resolution mode though, Focus enhancer isn’t supported, which might make the background of your close-up shot look blurry.

Have you tried the camera on the Galaxy S23 series? Let us know what you think in the comments!

The Community Team 

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[Glenntech]

Handy tips for the camera. Also good more software development updates are on the cards

[PaulC59]

S23 Ultra 512gb
I find the camera struggles with close ups in particular when lighting isn't good or under artificial light e.g indoors. I take a lot of photos of shopping receipts which are needed for evidence and occasionally info labels on devices etc and the camera can struggle to handle it, worst issues can be loss of detail, blurring or inability to get the correct colour e.g plain white background so when printed out a white background will often print as grey on a B&W printer or yellowy brown on a colour printer. Moving away from the object can sometimes help with detail and focus but not so much with colour e.g plain white can have a very light yellow or brown hue. Using the flash can help with improving the colour accuracy but can remove detail such as lines on a page or watermarks etc. In good light outside the camera is brilliant but it can struggle in lower light especially with close ups. I think a better macro option is needed or a function to turn off all auto enhancements for individual shots, kind of like how flight mode works but for easy deactivation of auto enhancement to photos which might help with detail and colour matching in close ups in lower light conditions. Whilst colour enhancement etc may improve a photo or make it look better, many people need real world colours etc to capture an actual identical image if that makes sense

[jdmattinson]

This is also the case on my Galaxy S22+ so an update for that too would be great