![]() ![]() I’d rather lose shadow detail than get a visibly distorted image, which is why I rank the Camera app in third place.Īpple’s app gets ranked third for the important test, but it fares dramatically less well on an interior shot. Against that, there is very little distortion - and that’s a big deal. That said, there’s a lot of pure black in the shot, and mid-tone areas are very murky. The iPhone X camera has significantly less noise in night shots than earlier generations, and the exposure is a good compromise. I’ve long been impressed by the iPhone cameras, and the low-light performance has gotten better and better over the years. There’s a fair bit of grain, which gives something of a pixellated look to the text, but honestly, for the amount of light here, I’m impressed. Close-up, though, we see a little less distortion in the ProCam shot, so I’m giving it the edge here. Viewed at the 1500 pixels wide resolution we’d typically see photos on the web or on social media, there’s not much visible difference. Both pull out pretty much exactly the same amount of light, though with some variance between shadows and mid-tones. There’s very little to choose between NightCap and ProCam. The interior shot is very fuzzy and with lots of noise. On balance, then, I rate this below the stock Camera app. And it does so at the cost of over-exposing the highlights (the blown-out windows) and introducing more distortion, especially visible toward the end of the foreground buildings. NightCap succeeds in pulling out more light from the shot than the stock Camera app - but not dramatically so. Where the interior shot is concerned, Spectre is good for only one thing: giving a realistic impression of just how dark it was! I would say this is a very good match for my actual view in this light. It was way, way worse than the stock Camera app. With the cityscape, the result was just a fuzzy mess. Unfortunately, it was by far the most disappointing in both tests. #6 SpectreĪs Spectre was from the team that brought us the really impressive Halide, I’d expected great things from it. So here, worst quality to best, are the results. We’re very fortunate in this respect: I don’t have to even leave the sofa to take night cityscape shots.īut I’ve also taken a handheld interior shot in very low light to give a sense of how it copes with other types of photos This isn’t in quite the same league as my now rather elderly Nikon D3, but the difference in quality is small, and the difference in size and weight isn’t!īut I’d love to be able to carry nothing more than an iPhone, and it’s this scenario I wanted to test. I used to carry a DSLR with me, and more recently switched to the Sony a6300. In every city I visit, I always head to the top of the tallest building I can find with public access, be it an observation deck or bar. If it’s people at a party, we’ll go put them in some light if we want proper shots if we’re shooting in the dark, it’s for the memory. But travel shots need to look good. It’s also the one shot where we really care about quality. This is the one area where smartphones have historically been weak, and the main reason I still carry a standalone camera these days when traveling. To me, the key requirement for night shots is capturing cityscapes at night. ProCam can do much more, so my ranking here applies only to this specific usage. Note that I am only comparing night-shot performance here. Spectre has the lowest resolution, hence the much smaller close-up. ![]() ![]() Note that not all apps shoot at the same resolution, and I’ve resized slightly to get a consistent view in 1000 pixels across. The resize is to 1500×750, the size I generally use for web and social media, and Photoshop quality 8 (my usual compromise between quality and file size).įor the cityscapes, I also include a close crop to show the quality in detail. I did my best to hold the iPhone as steadily as possible, but I didn’t brace against anything, for a realistic test.Īll shots are completely unedited bar a crop and resize. The double-glazing means that you can see reflections of some of the red lights in particular in some shots. The cityscape shots were taken with the camera pressed up against the inside of a double-glazed window, in the dark. For ProCam, which is not solely geared to night shots, I selected night mode but left everything else unchanged. In each case, I took two photos in succession to make sure there were no anomalies between them (there weren’t).Īll photos were taken with no manual adjustment of settings. I did a comparison with five other camera apps - including the stock one - to see how each fared with two different types of night shot…Īll photos were taken within the space of just a few minutes, so all were in the same light. A quick play this week with NeuralCam suggested it might be in with a shot of being the best iPhone camera app for night shots - but I needed to put that to the test. ![]()
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