Night Mode Photography With the iPhone 11

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at Night Mode Photography on the iPhone 11.

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I've been posting some Night Mode photos from my iPhone 11 Pro to the MacMost instagram account. People really like how these photos look. I do too. Let's take a look at how Night Mode works. 

Here I am in a dark room and I'm going to take a photo here in the corner. There's definitely not enough light for a good photo. Night Mode goes on automatically on the iPhone 11. You'll see it at the top or in this case the left side. It's this little crescent moon and it turns yellow and gives you a number of seconds next to it. You can see it adjusting a little bit the number of seconds as it tries to figure out the light as I move the camera around. You can turn this off by tapping there and the yellow will go away and you end up with a little crescent moon in a white icon. You also get a slider on the right when you tap it and that allows you to adjust the number of seconds it will take to get the photo. You can go to Automatic which is in the middle. You can move up to Maximum which will increase the number of seconds meaning you will have to hold the phone steady longer. Or you can actually switch it all the way to Off.

Let me go and take this photo with Night Mode turned off to see what we get. Now let's move the slider back to the Automatic setting which in this case will be three seconds. Then we'll take the photo and notice the photo slowly resolves over the three seconds and you get your result. Here you can compare the two photos. 

So the first part of Night Mode is the exposure, right. Taking a three second exposure with low light to get all the light out of it and create a nice image. However that's not the real magic. The real magic is Stabilization because you're not putting your iPhone on a tripod. That's typically how you would take long exposure photography. You put it on a tripod so the camera is completely stable. But when you're holding the phone, no matter how steady you are, it's not completely stable. What's happening here is the software is stabilizing the image. So all of the photos its taking during those three seconds it's combining them and stabilizing them so it is like your camera was on a tripod.

Of course you still can't move your camera wildly around. It works best if you hold your phone as steady as possible.

Now let's take a look at actually doing this at night outside.  Here's a nighttime photo where there's some very dark spots but also some very bright lit up signs. First let's take a regular non Night Mode photo for reference and we'll see what we get. The iPhone doesn't do bad at all. There's plenty of light here on the street even though it's night. Now let's try taking it in Night Mode. It's going to recommend a one second exposure. We'll just do that. Here is the result. The result is definitely a little bit better.

Alright. So we have a long exposure. We have image stabilization. But there's also something else because if you try to take a picture where there are things moving, like for instance headlights of cars, a long exposure and image stabilization is just going to get you streaks where those lights move over the course of those few seconds. But Night Mode is going to do better than that because it's putting together several images and figuring out the best parts of those images to use. So instead of the car headlights streaking across the picture they're actually going to appear right where they are at the beginning of the photo. So you can end up with resolution throughout the photo but not things being blurry and streaky.

So here's some examples. I'm going to take a photo here on the street and you see the cars are moving. It's going to take a one second Night Mode exposure yet the result doesn't show the headlights streaking. The car appears to be standing in one place. Here it is again and you see the result is going to be pretty much the same. The car seems to be stable even though the exposure would suggest that it moves across over the course of that one second. Here I'll even try increasing the exposure to two seconds to the maximum. The result still shows the car stable. It is not as perfect. You can see the car closest to me does show a bit of streaking. But much less than you would get over the course of the two seconds.

So here's some other shots that I got using Night Mode during my tests. The results are great. I can see why people are really excited about this. I think one of the best things about Night Mode is that is just works automatically. It's not something you need to switch on and think about in advance. It just comes on when the conditions are basically too bad to take a decent photo otherwise and you end up capturing something really good when otherwise you would have gotten, pretty much, nothing.

So if you just got a new iPhone 11, or 11 pro, give Night Mode a try tonight.