Samsung Galaxy Enhance-X has arrived for the Galaxy S23 series of phones, and it's well worth checking out if you wish you could edit your photos but lack knowledge or confidence.
As announced on Samsung's Korean-language forums, the Galaxy Enhance-X app, while still in beta, is freely downloadable from the Galaxy Store onto Galaxy S23 devices. This current version isn't yet available for Galaxy S22 users, but will apparently be coming to last year's flagship phone series.
Galaxy A-series users will also apparently get access to Enhance-X, too. We'd imagine the software won't be as fully-featured on devices like the Galaxy A54 due to the A-series' lower-powered chipsets.
What can Galaxy Enhance-X do?
Enhance-X is an editing app designed to handle most of the work for you, using AI to boost your JPEG images. (Note that Enhance-X doesn't support RAW format shots.) The improvements happen automatically with the Magic button or manually with stepped sliders for things like shadows, sharpness and HDR level.
Images are saved separately when edited, so you won't lose your originals to Enhance-X's algorithms.
Even more useful is the fact that any changes you make are shown in tandem with your original image using an inbuilt slider feature. That makes it super straightforward to see if your edits actually improved the image.
The effect can be quite profound, as we can see in the below image of the library at Chatsworth House. Details in this dimly-lit room in the famous British stately home are much easier to make out thanks to a single press of Enhance-X's Magic button.
In contrast, Enhance-X doesn't seem to have done much at all that I can notice in the selfie below. While maybe I should be flattered that the app thinks this self-portrait can't be improved, it does show that this app is not built for major creative edits.
An AI photo troubleshooter
Instead, what Galaxy Enhance-X excels at is making more transformative changes to an image that would take far more time and effort to do by yourself.
For instance, there's the upscaling feature to make images larger. Unlike the older version of Enhance-X, this now only works for images less than 1MP in size. Samsung says this feature's designed to increase the size of images downloaded from social media or sent by friends, while maintaining their sharpness.
I tried this by downloading an image from the Tom's Guide Twitter account showing the Galaxy S23 Ultra and the Galaxy S22 Ultra; I then upscaled that photo to four times the original resolution. You can tell the Enhance-X version has been tampered with in some way, but it's remarkable how sharp it still looks.
Another related feature is Fix Moiré, which tries to eliminate the fuzzy lines you get in an image taken of another display. In the photo below, we see what happened when I tried this feature on a picture of the Galaxy A54, taken from my monitor.
There are still some traces of the interference patterns visible if you look closely at the edited shot. But for times when you need to capture what's on screen but can't screenshot it directly, this seems to be an effective way of cleaning up this sort of shot.
Galaxy Enhance-X also offers shadow removal, which pretty straightforwardly tries to boost the darker areas of your image. You can see the difference this makes in the comparison below of a green mug of coffee.
Galaxy Enhance-X: Verdict
Built-in editing features within smartphones' gallery apps are pretty straightforward to use, but Galaxy Enhance-X takes things another step forward by being able to fix problems other phones couldn't do by themselves. The Galaxy S23 Ultra already sits at the top of our best camera phones guide, and this app makes it an even more worthy title holder.
What Galaxy Enhance-X lacks in specific editing tools it makes up for with the potential power of its automated enhancements. This isn't an app that will help remove unwanted parts of your composition like Google's Magic Eraser tool does. But fixes for compressed or moiréd images could prove invaluable. And since Enhance-X is free, you've got nothing to lose by trying it if you're already a Samsung phone user.
