Background information
The Alpha Chronicles: the case of the disappearing car
by Dominik Bärlocher
The iPhone 13 after dark: what is the «improved night mode» capable of?
8.10.2021
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Apple claims that the iPhone 13 will take even better pictures in dark areas. Our test will show the development Apple has gone through with Low Light Photography.
Nighttime, 10 p.m. in Bremgarten. A tripod and seven iPhones. This is the camera test that’ll show you how much better the improved Night Mode is on the iPhone 13.
Moreover, this also answers a question from user ggfoto, who asked:
Didn’t you notice the great macro feature and improved Night mode?
About this test
The test is simple, showing how the iPhones handle photography under real-life conditions. My tripod is the only thing that distinguishes our test from your usual point-and-shoot. I’m using the tripod to align the one-third grid on our iPhone cameras with the same point. This way, I can also instantly see how wide iPhone images go. Also, the same image from multiple cameras provides better and more accurate comparisons.
The goal of my test was to find out what exactly Apple was going for as they simply faded in «Night Mode» when introducing their new devices.
I chose a random night to take the actual photos. The sky was slightly overcast, I saw some stars. To my right, there’s the warm glow of Bremgarten’s wooden bridge, to my left I see street lights and the little windows of surrounding houses.
I chose this location to try and capture both warm orange and red tones in images, as well as the blue-cold night in the background. And the river in between, which tests the smartphone on how it deals with night long exposures. Is the water being smoothed out or am I seeing individual ripples?
It’s 10:26 p.m., and I’m pressing the shutter button on the 2nd gen iPhone SE for the first time. All other images were taken between then and 10:33 p.m. The light hardly changed during this time.
All phones are updated to iOS 15.
Night mode: what lies behind this innovation?
Night mode for a smartphone is a clever thing, combining hard- and software. On the hardware side, the sizes of the sensor and the aperture are relevant.
- The larger the sensor, the more light the camera can process.
- The lower the number of F-stops at the aperture, the more light hits the sensor.
On the software side, three elements in particular play a role:
- Exposure time: the longer the aperture is open, the more light it captures. Smartphones want to keep these as short as possible so that your night shot doesn’t look blurry.
- Image brightness: this usually gets increased dramatically to avoid everything slipping into darkness. Leading to light-blue skies on smartphone pictures and a whole lot of image noise.
- Blur filter: to make this noise less noticeable, smartphones apply a blur filter. Hard edges, as well as any noise, get smoothed out. One drawback: straight edges become wonky, and the image loses sharpness.
Accordingly, apertures are important in the iPhone 13 series camera systems.
Any smartphone artificial intelligence (AI) that shoots at night balances these elements and then some, giving you an image that is most certainly social media ready. They look great or at least passable on small screens, yet reveal some weaknesses on larger ones.
The iPhone 13 series cameras
Apple installed two different camera systems on the iPhone 13 series. The iPhone 13 Mini and iPhone 13 share one, while both Pro Phones share another. You can immediately tell there’s a difference, as there are either two or three camera lenses installed.
For this test, however, only a few of the aspects that make up an overall system are important.
Light sensitivity for the iPhone 13 Mini/iPhone 13
The built-in cameras on the iPhone 13 Mini and iPhone 13 are identical. They have two lenses.
- 12 megapixel, f/1.6 wide-angle lens.
- 12 megapixel, f/2.4 ultra wide-angle lens.
Light sensitivity for the iPhone 13 Pro/iPhone 13 Pro Max
The cameras are also identical in both iPhone 13 Pro versions. Additionally, a depth sensor is built in to support the lenses with Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR) tech.
- 12 megapixel, f/1.5 wide-angle lens.
- 12 megapixel, f/2.8 telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom.
- 12 megapixel, f/1.8 ultra wide-angle lens.
- Time-of-Flight (TOF) 3D LiDAR depth sensor.
All in all, the Pro model cameras should take better night pictures.
A direct comparison
Before I go too deep: here are all the pictures I took on all four phones. I’ll break down the special features and details later. Since digitec.ch, galaxus.ch, galaxus.de and galaxus.at don’t allow a zoom function, all images are available for you to download in a ZIP archive at the end of this text. In it you’ll find the original images.
iPhone 13 Mini
iPhone 13
iPhone 13 Pro
iPhone 13 Pro Max
The ever-present exposure question
Every time I take a photo at night, the iPhone demands I hold still for five seconds. This implies an exposure time of five seconds, leaving the camera lens open the whole time and running the risk of ruining your image if you aren’t completely still. But the EXIF data – metadata that records the details of your shot – says otherwise. No image has an exposure time of more than 1/2, or half a second.
Smartphone photography is ridiculed by professional photographers and the ambitious for this very reason: software does a lot of the work for you, also enhancing your work afterwards. All this happens without your input or supervision. That’s why it’s hard to tell what’s going on.
It may be that the iPhone saves incorrect EXIF data. However, it’s also possible that the iPhone takes several pictures using different settings during the five seconds before selecting and processing the best one. It may also be that your finished photo isn’t one image, but a collage of several shots.
One window can change everything
If you compare the iPhone 13 Mini with the iPhone 13, you shouldn’t really be able to tell any difference from the images alone.
Nevertheless, the images differ greatly. This can be clearly seen in the EXIF data. Then while the iPhone 13 Mini opts for the «Spot» Metering Mode, the iPhone 13 relies on «Pattern».
- Spot: the software estimates exposure based on the light in the centre of an image.
- Pattern: «Pattern» is sometimes called «Matrix Metering». With this exposure setting, an image is divided into a number of grids that vary from camera to camera. Each square is then analysed for brightness and detail. Based on this, an average is then calculated, which determines the exposure.
And indeed, if you look at the centre of the image, you’ll notice that a light went out in one of the windows.
Again, the iPhone does the work for you. A professional photographer would have to manually choose the exposure method, even if it wouldn’t make any noticeable difference in the finished shot. The iPhone, on the other hand, just does it.
Overzealous blurring
The biggest pitfall on any night mode is image softening. If a camera doesn’t capture enough light, software programmers may decide to turn up the brightness too much and then use soft focus to blur away any image noise. This always leads to extremely ugly pictures in which you can’t really see anything but vague outlines.
As a rule of thumb: the brighter a night sky, the stronger the blur.
The iPhone 13 isn’t the worst offender in this respect. Nevertheless, pictures from the latest iPhone generation don’t pass the PC screen test. When have you ever seen clouds over Switzerland that look like this?
It all looks okay on Instagram and Facebook, but on the big screen the flaws become obvious. However, these aren’t detectable during the day.
For comparison: no night mode and no light
Still, night mode is technologically impressive, even if I don’t like the light-blue skies. In my mind, nights aren’t light blue, but grey-black or a very dark blue. But I can’t blame the technology for that.
The photos above may have their flaws, but they’re still impressive when you look at what a camera phone without night mode spits out. You’ll need the 2nd generation iPhone SE for this. The single lens on this budget iPhone doesn’t support low-light photography.
Its night mode needs our modern-day light pollution, as without it nothing works. This becomes obvious in the very night tests with the iPhone 13 Pro Max. For that purpose, I visited the darkest place in the greater Zurich area that I know: Sihltalstrasse.
Verdict: slow but steady improvements
ggfoto posed a good question. Do you notice the improved night mode? No, not in this comparison. But we can derive a few rules of thumb about low light photography.
- The more camera lenses an iPhone has, the better the dark shot is.
- Having the newest iPhone won’t hurt either.
- Finally, the more money you’re willing to shell out, the better the end result.
However, this doesn’t mean that an iPhone 13 Pro or a Pro Max take perfect night pictures. Apple still isn’t immune to the usual weaknesses of night mode. Brightness is heavily amped up, and a blur filter is then used to conceal the worst features. This works, but remains quite unimpressive on a large screen. Such pictures show obvious weaknesses when inspected closely.
Apple’s hardware is developing slowly, the company isn’t competing for the most megapixels, and the aperture is also only gradually getting smaller. Apple is still a ways removed from Huawei’s virtual f/0.95 apertures, but this doesn’t devalue the performance of its AI/camera construct.
While we don’t quite know what the iPhone 13 is doing during the five-second exposure time, what results is quite respectable. The 13 series not only improves the aperture, but also adjusts the software well to get even more out of the images.
It’s now quite a while past midnight. I’m going to bed. Next time I’ll compare the iPhone Pro Max 11, 12 and 13.
References
- All original images from this article ready to download
- Comparing the iPhone 13 series camera systems (digitec.ch)
- Comparing the iPhone 13 series camera systems (gsmarena.com)
To clarify, I recommend you use the data from gsmarena.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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