From the course: iPhone and iPad Photography with iOS 14

Night mode - iOS Tutorial

From the course: iPhone and iPad Photography with iOS 14

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Night mode

- [Instructor] One of the more interesting photo features in iOS 14 is night mode, which is available on the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 models. Night mode utilizes computational photography to take many shots of a scene in low light or nighttime conditions, and then intelligently merge them together. Let's head out into the night and take it for a spin. Night mode will come on automatically whenever the iPhone camera senses that light levels are low and the shot would benefit from night mode. In this composition, night mode is not coming on because of the bright lamp that's mounted to the side of the garage. You can see the crescent moon night mode symbol on the left side, but it's white, which means that night mode is not on. But if I move the camera to include more of the darker areas of the scene to the right, you can see that night mode comes on, and this is indicated by the symbol turning yellow, along with an exposure time of a couple of seconds being displayed next to it. If I move the camera back so the view includes more of the bright light, then night mode will turn off. Now even if night mode does not come on automatically, you can tap on the symbol to manually turn it on. Then you'll see a timescale next to the white shutter button. You can swipe on this to increase the exposure time that the camera will use. In this scene, which is influenced by the bright light, three seconds is the maximum time it will use. For this photo of the night sky, the exposure was 10 seconds, which is the maximum time for a handheld shot. I was able to hold it pretty steady by pressing my elbows into my torso. If you see cross hairs appear on the screen, that means that movement has been detected, and you can use these cross hairs as a guide to try and keep the shots steady. The intelligent combination of several shots did a very good job rendering the stars as sharply focused points of light, as you can see in this processed version of the raw night mode image. Now let's explore a different location. For this shot, I'm set up underneath an old stone bridge by a creek. It's about 45 minutes after sunset, and there's some light from a nearby street light that is lighting the top of the building in the background. The default, or auto exposure for night mode based on the light levels in this scene is five seconds. Since I have the iPhone on a tripod, I want to do a longer exposure. I'll tap on either of the night mode icons to open up the exposure dial, and I'll swipe on the dial to increase the exposure to a maximum of 30 seconds. I have the camera set to capture in raw format to give me a file with the most exposure information possible. When you're doing a long exposure in night mode, you'll see the image gradually build up over time as all of the multiple exposures are averaged together and combined. Now one thing about night mode is that you'll get better results if there's some light in the scene. This is a very dark location under the bridge, but there's still a hint of the recent sunset in the sky, and some nearby artificial light. Twilight times when there's a wonderful blue color in the sky will yield very satisfying results, as will places where there's a lot of city light adding to the scene. Locations out in the deep dark woods can result in some interesting silhouettes against the sky, but don't expect good detail in the shadows if there's no light to reveal that detail. Of course, in that case, you can try using a flashlight to paint illumination on nearby elements. All right, let's take a look at the exposure from the creek. And you can see that this is quite an improvement over what the camera showed in the live view. As I stand here, the actual scene doesn't look anywhere near this bright, but you can still see that it's done a very good job balancing out the brightness of the building and the trees, and there's a lot of very good detail in the shadows. The stream is looking really nice and I love the way the water is blurred. So overall, very impressive. Another thing to understand about night mode images photographed in the pro raw format, is that they usually look much better when you open them up in the edit screen. And you can see that with this image. If I zoom up close to check out the detail in the trees, it looks very soft. On the bark of the tree, and the pine needles, it almost looks like a watercolor painting. But if I open this up into the edit screen and I zoom up on that same area, we can see that the detail has now resolved. We can even see individual pine needles there, and the detail on the bark of the tree looks really good. And of course, once you begin to apply actual adjustments to the photo, you can really bring out a lot more information with a raw file. For example, here's the unprocessed version of the raw file I shot by the creek. And here's a version that I processed in the edit screen of the photos app. Because it was a raw file, there was a lot of information just waiting to be revealed. We take a look at processing raw files, including some night mode shots later in the course in the chapter on editing your images. For iPhones that support it, night mode is a wonderful feature in the native iOS camera app. It's not the same level of quality that you would expect from a more full featured camera with a larger image sensor, but it's great to be able to make images with your phone in lower light environments. You'll find that having this capability will really open up new avenues of creativity for shooting at night or in low light conditions.

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