Taking photos at night on your phone used to look terrible, but recent phones have much improved capabilities. Julian Chokkattu, reviews editor at WIRED, explains how smartphone camera technology has gotten so much better.
[MUSIC PLAYING] JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Taking photos at night on your phone used to look terrible, but if you've purchased a new smartphone recently, you may have noticed that your night photos have improved. Ah. Much better. You can even take photos of stars. I'm Julian Chokkattu-- reviews editor at WIRED-- and I've been reviewing smartphones for over five years. How has smartphone photography gone from this to this beautiful photo? Before we get into the technology behind the new night modes, let's first have a little chat about bad photos. Take a look at this photo here, taken on an iPhone 5 around 2014. A couple of elements stand out to me, like that classic lens flare or the blur. No matter how nice or advanced the camera is, it's always going to need a good source of light. That's exposure-- the amount of light that reaches your camera's sensor. Right now, this lovely crew has lit me really well. Let me show you. If they cut the lights, now I'm backlit and underexposed. This is the iPhone 3G in low light and this is the iPhone 13 Pro in low light. Let's get the lights back on. The part of the reason the iPhone 3G looks so underexposed is because it didn't spend a lot of time taking the photo. That's shutter speed-- that's The length of time the camera's little door is open exposing light onto the camera sensor. One of the main reasons night mode on your phone asks you to stay still is because the longer you have the shutter open, the more light you can let in, which will produce a brighter photo, but here's the thing. In night photos, the seconds it's asking you to wait, it's actually taking more and more photos to make a composite with machine learning algorithms so night mode is a part of the field of computational photography. I'm going to call up Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Photo Lab to get into the technical elements of how it works. RAMESH RASKAR: Hi, Julian. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Would you be able to tell me what exactly is happening when you take a night photo in a modern day smartphone? RAMESH RASKAR: There are three elements in any photography-- there is capture, there is process, and then there's display-- and what we have seen over the last 10 years is there is amazing improvement in all three areas. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: So how is the software actually changing what the photo will look like? RAMESH RASKAR: You will hear all these terms-- HDR, HDR+, night mode, smart HDR-- but all of them are roughly doing the same thing. This key idea of so-called deep fusion-- where you're fusing the photos by using machine learning and computer vision-- is really the breakthrough into this low light photography. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Could you explain HDR? RAMESH RASKAR: So HDR traditionally-- high dynamic range-- simply means whether it's bright scene or a dark scene, you can capture that in a single photo. A smartphone has seen millions of photos of a sunset or a food or a human face. It has learned over time, what are the best ways to enhance your photo and how to either reduce the graininess or how to make it look more vibrant and choose the right saturation. Choosing those parameters is basically, machine learning when it comes to photography. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Now, let's take a look at this machine learning in action by comparing some photos. The one on the left is the iPhone 3G-- so quite a long time ago-- and the one on the right is the iPhone 12. What are your first thoughts in what they're doing differently? RAMESH RASKAR: So you can see that the previous phones just gave you a photo from a single instant. The photo on the right is actually not physically real, in the sense that there were different things-- people were bobbling their heads and the lights were flashing and so the photo's actually composed by multiple instances. So when you try to fuse these multiple photos, the light in one photo could be at one direction, light in the later photo could be in a different direction and it's taking some clever decisions to create an illusion as if this photo was taken at a single instant. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Here you can also see the HDR into effect where the audience is completely dark in the iPhone 3G photo, whereas you can actually see everyone's heads in the other one. If an AI is learning how to color correct a night scene based on what it thinks it should be, are we moving away from photorealism? RAMESH RASKAR: Julian, I think photorealism is dead. We should just bury it and it's all about hallucination. The photo you get today has almost nothing to do with what the physics of the photo says. It's all based on what these companies are saying the photo should look like. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: So, yeah. I took one of these with the Pixel 6 and one of these with the iPhone 13 Max Pro. What happened there that would have caused those colors to be very different between the two photos? RAMESH RASKAR: These two companies have decided to give you a very different photo experience. The Pixel might have taken 20 photos. It's also recognizing certain features, whether there's a sky, is it outdoor, what kind of white balance it has. There's some automatic beautification also being applied. So most of the photos we see are hallucinations, but not the physical representation of the world out there. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: These companies are providing us with ways to control some of that, like turn off that beautification feature or maybe make it even stronger? Do you think that's, sort of, where the compromise will lie with the people that do want to maybe tailor some of their own shots to give them that control and those options to tweak their settings? RAMESH RASKAR: The innovations in all these three areas have actually taken the control away from us, but in reality, it's not that difficult for these companies to provide controls back to us. They're just making an assumption that most consumers would like to just take a photo, click a button, and get something they really would like to see, whether it matches the reality or not. I think the thing that we really care about is we go on a trip and you reach Paris and the Eiffel Tower is in a haze and what you would like to see is take a photo with your family with Eiffel tower in the back as if it's a bright sunny day. And that's where, as a consumer, you, yourself, are willing to separate the physics, the reality from hallucination because if somebody can paste just a bright sunny photo of Eiffel tower behind your family, you'll be pretty happy about it. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: So we kind of focused on night photography. Every time we look at the nighttime photos, those actually do seem to be improving year over year, but broadly, what would you say are some of those challenges that are left for photography in general when it comes to smartphones? RAMESH RASKAR: In terms of night mode, there are lots of challenges right now. I mean, if you want to do something that's high speed, it's very difficult to capture that at nighttime. It's also difficult to capture very good color in nighttime because nighttime photos, when they use burst mode, the challenge with burst mode is that every frame has a so-called read noise so there's a cost a camera pays every time it reads the photos. But the other technique many companies are using is just using lots of tiny lenses. Now, some phone companies have five lenses and that's one trick to capture just five times more light. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: How does that affect the rest of the phone's capabilities? What can we expect in the future? RAMESH RASKAR: Photography or imaging should give us superhuman powers so we should be able to see through fog. We should be able to see through rain. We should be able to see, like, a butterfly and see all the spectrums, not just the three colors. I think the notion that we should just see what we are seemingly experiencing is not enough on displays, but I would like to see a beautiful viewfinder. If I'm in Paris and as I'm moving my viewfinder, it should tell me, hey, if I take a picture of the Eiffel tower, it's very jaded. A lot of people aren't taking a photo. But if you keep rolling under this tiny statue-- actually not enough people have taken the photo of this. So I think we're going to see this very interesting progress in capture, processing, and display and I'm very excited about what photography of tomorrow will look like. [MUSIC PLAYING] JULIAN CHOKKATTU: I'm going to show you some of my favorite features with the iPhone 13 Pro and the Google Pixel 6. We're doing low light photography so let's cut the lights. Let's open up the camera and see what happens with night mode. You can see that I'm already in a pretty dark area so night mode has been triggered here. Once you tap it, you can actually control the length of the exposure. So if you think that you might need a longer shot-- sometimes that might produce a brighter image-- if I tap on the background, it'll expose for the background and it will also change the focus there so you can actually slide it up and down to change the brightness or the shadows in the shot. Those are just a couple of features in the Camera app themselves. All right. Let's bring the lights back on. So we have to talk about tripods. Tripods are an easy way to up your photo game, especially at night. Of course, a large problem of taking photos at night is the hand shake of when you're taking a photo. Once more, can we cut the lights? Can I get a volunteer? So now, I'm going to first, take a photo without a tripod and see how it reacts then. So you can just basically, switch over to the Night Sight mode and tap the photo. But now, if I switch over to a tripod, it's going to be much more stable and if I tap the button, it knows that it's on a tripod and you can see it is taking a lot longer to take the photo. It's taking multiple images of different exposures. Shooting handheld is a problem because the shutter speed is trying to take in as much light as possible and that means your hands are shaking and that's influencing the shot. That's what makes it impossible taking photos of stars without a tripod. Certain phones-- like the Pixel 6-- let you take photos of the star with a certain astrophotography mode and essentially, it's doing what night mode is doing, but for a much longer period of time-- like two, three, sometimes even five minutes-- and what it really needs is the phone to be on a tripod. If you're curious about what some of our favorite phones are for taking photos or maybe just looking at other camera gear that might help you take some of these better photos, well, we have guides on wired.com. And as Ramesh said, it's going to be really interesting to see how our cameras improve in the future, whether they'll completely decide on their own exactly what photo you should take or if you have any control left. RAMESH RASKAR: Photorealism is dead. JULIAN CHOKKATTU: Now that's dark. Jesus. [BEEP] I hope this video helped you understand a little bit more about night photography and I hope you continue going out there taking lots and lots of photos.
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