Master low–light photography
Discover how to reveal more detail in the dark.
Shooting in low-light locations is a challenge. An iPhone can try using a faster ISO and a wider aperture to make it more sensitive to available light but this can add nasty image noise to your shots. Here are some handy suggestions for capturing better-looking photographs in low-light scenarios.
1 Summon the flash
One way for you to cast more light on a subject is to activate the built-in flash by tapping the Camera app’s flash icon. Flash is not an ideal solution, though. A burst of flash can illuminate a person standing close to the iPhone, but it will plunge the distant background into underexposed shadow. And some locations may not permit the use of flash, such as inside a church or museum.
2 Use a tripod
When your iPhone meters a low-light scene it will use a slower shutter speed to let in more light. If you don’t hold the iPhone still enough, you may add unwanted shake-induced blur to the image. By using a tripod, you can keep the iPhone rock-steady during the long exposure. This will cause static subjects such as buildings to look sharp. Moving subjects such as cars and people may appear motion-blurred depending on the shutter speed, which adds a dynamic sense of movement to the scene. If you have an iPhone 11 model, a tripod is not as essential thanks to Night mode.
3 Use Night mode
On the iPhone 11 models, you can shoot in Night mode when faced with lowlight locations. This enables you to capture a handheld long-exposure while keeping camera-shake blur at bay. Night mode produces astonishingly good results, revealing details such as clouds and stars that are not as visible to the
naked eye. Your Night mode shots will suffer less from high ISO speed noise.
4 Read the metadata
To understand the settings that the iPhone uses in low-light locations, click on a picture in your Mac’s Photos app. Click the “i” icon at the top right. This opens a metadata panel that provides you with the photo’s shooting settings such as ISO (sensitivity to light). The higher the ISO speed, the more sensitive to light your iPhone will be. A high ISO speed such as 2,000 will add ugly particles of picture noise to your low-light shot. When faced with a high ISO speed shot, click on Edit and use the Noise Reduction slider to smooth out the noise.
5 Shoot in raw
Photo file formats such as HEIC and JPEG compress an image so that it takes up less space. This makes it harder to reveal color and detail in low–light shots. With an uncompressed image, such as a .DNG (Digital Negative), you can restore missing detail without revealing as many nasty compression artefacts.