Last week, we highlighted a tweet from Jeremy Burge showing pairs of low light images, taken with an iPhone and a Google Pixel using Night Sight.
Jeremy pulled together his findings in a blog post that makes the case for Google’s Night Sight as the new benchmark for low light image capture on a smartphone.
From the post:
Despite being a long-time iPhone user, I often find myself with other phones for testing purposes. Sometimes they have nice features my iPhone doesn’t have, but rarely does any single feature make me even consider changing devices.
The release of Google’s Night Sight feature for the Pixel line in 2018 is a game changing feature.
Having used it for the past month, I now carry both my iPhone and Pixel of an evening. That’s how good it is.
And:
Since posting about this on Twitter, time and time again people said “just edit the iPhone pictures!”. This misses two points:
- Most people don’t have the time or ability to fix their dark and/or blurry iPhone photos taken at night
- Some of this cannot be done by editing. That 2-5 second time used to capture more light in the Google camera app isn’t an option provided on iOS.
I couldn’t agree with Jeremy more. Like it or not, this is the new benchmark for low-light photos.
I would gladly tap a button in the camera app to turn on/off low light mode before I take a picture. And if Apple can just do this automatically, even better. I frequently find myself unsatisfied with my iPhone camera in low light situations. I would love an iPhone version of Night Sight.
And to be fair, the iPhone XS clearly has made great low-light strides. But Night Sight runs on older hardware. It’s a software fix. Feels like this sort of technique should be possible on previous generations of iPhone.