Night mode “just works”
Night Mode with 10 second exposure
With that out of the way, let’s get into Night mode. This automatic feature enables itself when the iPhone recognizes a scene dark enough to warrant it. With Night mode turned off on the Pro and compared to the iPhone XS, the results are a slightly brighter and better-looking picture.
You can tweak the aggressiveness of Night mode by setting the exposure time to max, auto, or off, but this can only be tweaked within the parameters the iPhone deems fit. For instance, some scenes may be bright enough that it only allows a maximum one-second exposure time, even if that’s the auto setting as well. In much darker scenes, you can go for up to a 10-second or more exposure time, while the auto may opt for two or three. Most shots taken in the auto mode seem to fall in the one to two-second range.
The main exception to this is when you’re taking pictures of the stars — something very few smartphones can do. For this, you’ll want to crank the exposure time up to the max and enjoy snapping photos iPhone users once thought were only possible with a DSLR. They’re not DSLR quality and have a substantial bit of noise, but the long exposure produces pleasing portrayals of the stars without brightening the sky to the point of a gray or blue smear.
In terms of functionality, once I started snapping nighttime pics, I never cared that Night mode can’t be turned on manually. Being automatic, you don’t ever end up enabling it in a situation where you’re forcing it to overstep its bounds and consequently produce a worse picture than were it not enabled. This is a common occurrence I’ve noticed with Night Mode on the Galaxy Note 10, for instance; sometimes you need to shoot in both modes to find out after the fact which mode was actually needed.
Galaxy Note 10 Night Mode
Apple’s goal with Night mode, as it is with all of its camera features, is to give you the best chance at capturing that perfect shot without you having to think about it, and in almost every instance I found the iPhone 11 Pro delivering on that promise. Compared to Google’s Night Sight on the Pixel 3, the iPhone 11 Pro’s Night mode proved more photographically realistic in its interpretations of lighting while also capturing a little more detail than the Pixel 3.
The iPhone’s Night mode makes scenes look as though a photographer set up professional studio lighting. It brings more balanced light to the whole scene, while intentionally highlighting certain areas of the shot and keeping already bright highlights in check, making it look more natural and aesthetically pleasing.
Google’s Night Sight does an excellent job with a lot of this as well but quickly falls behind when dealing with bright spots in a dynamic scene, typically over-exposing these areas and making the shot appear overly-bright and artificial compared to the iPhone. It’s a difference you can see clearly in the background of these two photos.
While they both expose and denoise the flowers and grass well, the iPhone makes the foreground a priority with lighting, giving the subject (the flowers) the spotlight, while the Pixel’s algorithm can’t help but pull your eyes away from the flowers with the extremely bright background areas. This is the difference that the iPhone 11 Pro makes: creating a nighttime photo that’s not just brighter, but more beautiful.
Samsung still has some ground to make up on both Google and Apple, as its night mode is the least realistic and most likely to make a shot worse than better when it’s not an absolute necessity.