LG’s Graphy app will help you rip off your favorite photographer’s style

LG’s trickle of pre-launch news about the upcoming V30 flagship-tier Android smartphone today turns to the new software that will be on board. Chief among the novelties is Graphy, a component of the manual mode in LG’s camera app that will allow users to apply the same “style and mood” of a chosen professional photo to their own. It sounds almost like Prisma, last summer’s popular style transfer app, but LG is doing it in a different manner, applying the photographic settings of the selected image (white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO) to photos taken with the V30. It’s not abundantly clear how that will work, because obviously every picture will require a shutter speed matched to its environmental light, but presumably it’ll recreate the look rather than the direct effect of those tweaks.

Also potentially interesting are the new options for unlocking the phone: one is facial recognition without having to press the power button or turn the screen on, and the other is unlocking the V30 by speaking a pass phrase.

One thing that will be missing from LG’s V series of phones for the first time is the secondary display above the main one. That’s being replaced on the V30, which is set to have a 6-inch OLED screen with tiny bezels similar to the ones on the LG G6 earlier this year. The new software toolbar is called a Floating Bar and it looks like a nuisance to position anywhere on the screen without it being a hindrance. The whole benefit of the second screen, for those who liked it, was that it was a separate section.

Finally, to make the most out of the OLED screen’s better battery efficiency when displaying small snippets of information on screen, LG is expanding the functionality of its always-on display. It can now show the time, date, notifications, quick tools, music controls, or a user-selected photo. It’s all shaping up to be a rather predictable, gradual set of changes from the LG G6, though the new unlocking mechanisms could prove to be quite delightful, if executed correctly.