Edit: Forget everything I said... the auto camera/auto color profile in pro mode is indeed extremely accurate in daylight. Still a little too warm/green but not as severe as I expected. So that's cool. Still trying to decide if I want to use a custom profile or not. Just wish I didn't write a novel about it......
Beyond the "water resistance" the camera was the main selling point for me (my username doesn't reflect it but I am a professional sports photographer (MLB, NFL, NHL, NASL, college sports), & I immediately switched it to pro mode & was happy to stumble upon the two custom color profiles.
What a difference. Just got the phone today so haven't taken any photos beyond like soda cans, but I can't believe how bad the auto color profile is. Overly saturated (typical Samsung, but it looks good in some usages), but the main issue for me was the white balance.
Using auto everything: a white wall was of course yellow/orange.
Simply changing the white balance did not resolve this. This wasn't surprising since we're still in the days of the hardware/software being leagues behind actual cameras, and even my 6S Plus had white balance issues.
It may not have helped with it being a bathroom wall under antiquated non led lighting, but I'm so happy we have those color profiles to abuse, because after this experiment my S7 is on-par color wise with any of my actual cameras, whereas the 6S would've needed color correction (among typical things: contrast, sharpness etc.) after taking the photo (using the stock Camera app).
Anyway, that was a crap load of text in an image thread. I do apologize but I wanted to at least provide the setting values I'll be sticking with as they seem to be as accurate to real life color as possible.
Hopefully they work in daylight as it was midnight when I set the color profile & walked around the house comparing the on screen colors of objects to the real life colors lol - struggled with orange objects like cheese & the gatorade cap. Could not color match cheddar cheese, and would have to oversaturate & lose detail to get the proper deeper orange for the cap - while also destroying good balances for other colors. This issue even passed onto my skin tone which is warm/orange in real life under a bedroom light but displays as a dull white on the phone screen.
Needless to say this will not replace an actual camera but it's worth setting a color profile to get the best results it's capable of capturing with only minimal post processing/editing needed for share-worthy images.
I also recommend +.4 EV (this may change in daylight but daylight is 4 hours away so). The metering modes & focus options are never set in stone nor are the main manual controls so no point in writing another wall of text lol (apologies again, folks!)
Surprisingly, I did have to boost the saturation a touch to compensate for the less warm tones taken away by the color temp & tint change.
I’m just amazed how much detail shows up in the tiny condensation bubbles in the Gatorade bottle… I’m not a pixel peeper by any means but it’s impressive to see that detail zooming in with a non-macro shot (was like a foot or so away) compared to the “macro ability” of the 6S line. Can't wait to get out & start using this...
Really wish the quick launch cam could be set to pro mode though. I've already got the pro mode shortcut on the home screen so now I'll wait patiently for Samsung to hook us up (& fix the stupid raw setting turning off all the time... in my current 1 day of ownership lol)