How to take better night photos with your smartphone

Most smartphones take incredible photos in daylight, but thanks to their tiny sensors, night photography is always a challenge. The problem is that the sensors on your smartphone’s camera simply can’t gather enough light to capture a photo. Manufacturers get around this by increasing exposure time (which can result in more blurring), boosting sensitivity (increasing noise), and by using AI (which often doesn’t give you the results you expect).

How does one work within these limitations to capture a great photo at night?

Use night mode

Almost all smartphones come with some sort of night mode. Start using it if you aren’t already. This is the easiest way to capture great photos at night. The camera uses a combination of long exposure, high ISOs, and AI to attempt to capture an image that’s good enough to use. It doesn’t always work, but if you spend a bit of time tuning the scene before capture, you can capture some incredible shots. 

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Get comfortable with adjusting exposure, sensitivity, and even colour tone to get more control over your shots. If you love astrophotography, your best bet is to use the astrophotography mode that comes with your phone. Shooting planets and the like is more complex than simply getting a long exposure, and smartphone camera makers tend to do a decent job enabling such capture.

Use a tripod (and use a self-timer)

This option works best for still photos. Placing the phone on a stable surface such as a tripod or wall is a great way to get a good night shot. Obviously, the one limitation is that you’ll need a subject that’s very still, but that might be fine for many scenarios. 

We’d also recommend that you set up a self-timer for the shot, or use a remote trigger such as via a supported watch accessory, bluetooth trigger, or even the S-Pen (in the case of older Samsung Galaxy phones). This way you won’t shake the camera when clicking a photo.

Install Lightroom (and use RAW if available)

Like it or not, night photos just don’t look that great most of the time because of noise and poor colour accuracy. The exposure can also be all over the place. Night mode in your camera app can help, but it doesn’t always give you the control you desire over your photos. 

The next best thing you can do in such a scenario is to shoot in RAW (if your camera supports it) and then edit the photos in a powerful image editing app such as Lightroom. RAW files are much larger than the standard JPG or HEIC files that your camera captures, but RAW also holds a lot more detail that you can draw out with the right app, such as Lightroom.

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Lightroom might seem like a daunting app to use at first, but it’s very powerful and is great for making edits and tuning the image to your liking.  Even if you don’t want to use Lightroom, you can find a tonne of free and paid alternatives that are more to your taste.

Happy shooting!