Google's new Night Sight: A game-changer for night-time photography

Google's Night Sight mode on its Pixel smartphones combines a number of photos to create one shot that vastly lightens up dark photos. — dpa

Smartphone cameras have been upping their game over the past few years, with a number of companies seeming to put all their energy into improving the quality of pictures taken by their flagship phones. But when it comes to taking pictures at night, most phones fall short.

In its push towards better photography, Google is no different, with its Pixel's camera improving with every new update. But Google is different from its competitors in one key way, and that's simply because it is Google.

The company's access to the best software solutions and the newest developments in machine learning are a game-changer - and this is all coming to fruition in the Pixel 3.

The Pixel's Night Sight mode is groundbreaking, as the software turns night into day, albeit with some compromises. Google first presented the software in October when it announced the new Pixel 3. At that presentation, Google compared a picture of a group of people taken with Night Sight with the same picture taken by Apple's most recent iPhone XS.

The contrast was striking: while the iPhone picture looked pretty dark, the Pixel 3 image basically looked like someone had shone a very bright light onto the group.

But the Pixel 3 did not have the software when it first came out – Night Sight only just became available with the latest update.

The first look at the new update reveals that Google has not promised too much. Even if you leave the default settings, the Pixel 3 takes extraordinary pictures in low light conditions. If you then turn on Night Sight, the images improve significantly, they are brighter and show more details that were hidden in the dark.

The downside is that Night Sight takes a couple of seconds to take the picture – and the darker it is, the longer it takes. This means you have to try and hold the phone still during this time, although the software tries to remove the unavoidable blur with its gyro sensor.

When out and about in a well-lit city street, the default camera settings may offer better pictures for your own personal taste – but either way, you can count on the Pixel to give you the best option.

Night Sight is reminiscent of the HDR mode in other smartphones: The camera takes several pictures at once and then puts them all together to create the best photograph. During the day, the HDR feature makes sure to take high-contrast, well-lit pictures, which works especially well if there's a good mixture of light and dark. The camera is also great for taking pictures against the light.

When Google first tried to adapt HDR mode for night photography, the software was pushed to its limits. "The autofocus didn't work anymore, the colours weren't recognised," says Isaac Reynolds, Google's product manager. But the developers were able to find a solution in machine learning.

If the camera senses that it's too dark for autofocus, then the software sets it to infinity. Detecting realistic colours is more complicated: The software makes an assumption about what colours it is detecting on the basis of a general colour scheme and the visible grey tones. One Night Sight picture is a combination of around 15 images overall. The phone does not need to be connected to the Internet for any of this.

It's fun to see how far you can go with Night Sight, but it can't do magic. If you take a picture in a completely black room, the feature won't be able to produce a miracle. But even if there's the tiniest chink of light available, you can tell a difference. The Night Sight mode will detect objects and colours where the normal mode won't see anything.

Night Sight has also been introduced to the older Pixel phones – although not all of the software is compatible. Android users needn't get their hopes up – the software is not going to be made available to other manufacturers, says Reynolds, as it has been tailored to the Pixel's hardware. – dpa