Night Sight shoots pictures in the dark
AT NIGHT for the past few weeks, I’ve been tromping around dark places taking photos using a new mode on Google’s US$800 Pixel 3 called Night Sight.
Friends in a candlelit bar look like they brought a lighting crew. Dark streets are flush with reds and greens. A midnight cityscape lights up as though it was late afternoon. It goes way beyond an Instagram filter into you gottasee-this territory.
Night Sight is a super step forward for smartphone photography - and an example of how our photos are becoming, well, super fake.
For now, Night Sight is only a mode that pops up in dark shots on Google’s Pixel phones.
When I recently took the same sunset photo with an iPhone 6 from 2014 and this year’s iPhone XR, I was gobsmacked at the difference - the newer iPhone shot looked as though it had been painted with watercolours.
Artificial intelligence and other software advances are democratising creating beauty. Yes, beauty. Editing photos no longer requires Photoshop skills. Now when presented with a scenic vista or smiling face, phone cameras tap into algorithms trained on what humans like to see and churn out tuned images.
If we can’t see it, we don’t know what it looks like. There are a lot of aesthetic decisions. We made them one way, you could make them a different way. Maybe eventually these phones will need a ‘What I see’ versus ‘What is really there’ button. — Marc Levoy, retired Stanford computer science professor
Increasingly, it’s software - not hardware - that’s making our photos better. “It is hyperbole, but true,” says Marc Levoy, a retired Stanford computer science professor who once taught Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and now works for them on camera projects including Night Sight.
Levoy’s work is rooted in the inherent size limitations of a smartphone. Phones can’t fit big lenses (and the sensors underneath them) like traditional cameras, so makers had to find creative ways to compensate. Enter techniques that replace optics with software, such as digitally combining multiple shots into one.
New phones from Apple, Samsung and Huawei use it too, but “we bet the ranch on software and AI,” Levoy says. This liberated Google to explore making images in new ways.
“Google in terms of software has got an edge,” says Nicolas Touchard, the vice president of marketing at DxOMark Image Labs, which produces independent benchmark ratings for cameras.
With Night Sight, Google’s software is at its most extreme, capturing up to 15 lowlight shots and blending them together to brighten up faces, provide sharp details and saturate colours in a way that draws in the eye. No flashes go off - it artificially enhances the light that’s already there.
The problem is: How does a computer choose the tones and colours of things we experience in the dark? Should it render a starlit sky like dusk?
“If we can’t see it, we don’t know what it looks like,” says Levoy. “There are a lot of aesthetic decisions. We made them one way, you could make them a different way. Maybe eventually these phones will need a ‘What I see’ versus ‘What is really there’ button.”
So if our phones are making up colours and lighting to please us, does it really count as photography? Or is it computergenerated artwork?
Some purists argue the latter. “This is always what happens with disruptive technology,” says Levoy.
For another perspective, I called Kenan Aktulun, the founder of the annual iPhone Photography Awards. Over the last decade, he’s examined over a million photos taken with iPhones, which entrants are discouraged from heavily editing.
The line between digital art and photography “gets really blurry at some point,” Aktulun says. Yet he ultimately welcomes technological improvements that make the photo-creating process and tools invisible. The lure of smartphone photography is that it’s accessible - one button, and you’re there. AI is an evolution of that.
“As the technical quality of images has improved, what we are looking for is the emotional connection,” Aktulun says. “The ones that get a lot more attention are not technically perfect. They’re photos that provide insight into the person’s life or experience.” —Washington Post.