Google is making Night Sight a major mode for capturing stunning photos on Pixel phones

We found that Night sight is best suited to super dark scenes where the regular camera modes just won't expose long enough to bring out the shadows. The pseudo long exposures and image stacking that happens under the hood in the Night mode processing does produce noticeably brighter shots with detail in the shadows recovered and dynamic range that the eyes don't really capture.

Google's Night Sight mode(Opens in a new window) just became one of the top reasons to buy a Pixel phone. Night Sight combines a burst of different photos to create a super-bright image even in low light, outpacing other phone cameras' night modes. It's coming to all three generations of the Google Pixel phones as a free software update, but we tested it in our lab on a Pixel 3. Software like this was the key factor in making the Pixel 3 our Android phone of the year for 2018.

Google is making Night Sight one of the main camera modes on Pixel phones

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Google's astrophotography mode is built into the stock camera app that ships with the Pixel phones. It's been a part of the stock camera app since 2019 when it arrived with the Pixel 4, and it's here on the new Pixel 7 series, too. The astrophotography mode is available on Pixel 3 and newer Pixel phones, so all modern Google phones can use the company's computational photography features to turn your boring night sky into a magical scenery.

Google earned praise for how well its Pixel phones can shoot photos in the dark thanks to Night Sight, a smartphone camera feature it launched in 2018. But with the iPhone 11, Apple was quick to follow suit with its own night mode, which kicks in automatically when snapping photos in low-light situations.

The camera app has a simple interface, with Google making some UI changes more recently. It brings better zoom controls, wide-angle portrait mode on supported phones, and other smaller changes like standard stabilization and cinematic pan-in video modes. There is also a drop-down menu from the top that brings up settings to change ratio, add a timer, turn flash on or off, and more. Then there are subtle additions, where the AI will prompt to move slightly backward to improve the focus. But sadly, I was disappointed to see Google dropping support for AR Playground.

If you want top-quality images, a powerful smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra or the Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max is a good bet. These smartphones have superior cameras and feature some great nighttime shooting modes.

The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro camera specs look impressive on paper, but they do not blow the iPhone 13 Pro and Galaxy S21 cameras away. Despite the main wide lens having a 50-megapixel image sensor, the Pixel 6s can only spit out 12-megapixel photos; there's no way to shoot full-resolution pics like on other Android phones with high-resolution sensors. Most photos look as good as shots taken with the iPhone 13s or S21s. And sometimes, the photos look worse. Photos can be oversharpened; shadow and contrast detail inexplicably reduced; Night Sight still tends to over-brighten low-light photos to the point where much of a scene's darkness is wiped out.

The image sensor for the 50-megapixel shooter on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro cameras is larger than ever before; Google says it lets in 2.5x more light than the sensor on the Pixel 5. For night shots, that means cleaner shots in the dark with less image noise. But like low-light, the Pixel 6s lean on auto Night Sight to get an edge, whereas the iPhone 13 Pro is usually able to snap a photo without needing you to hold steady. 2ff7e9595c