- What Night Mode actually does to your shots
- Why auto-switching gets annoying fast
- The toggle that puts you back in control
Night Mode is one of those features that works brilliantly until it doesn’t. In low light, it’s great – longer shutter, more light, cleaner shot. But when the lighting is borderline, it flicks on and off like a broken strip light. And every time you relaunch the Camera app, it resets, so any manual adjustment you made is gone. Fortunately, there’s a setting that fixes this.
Disable auto-Night Mode
You’ll know from using Night Mode that each time you launch the Camera app, your iPhone detects the level of light and activates Night Mode accordingly. What you may not know is that you can disable Night Mode for an individual image by tapping the yellow Night Mode icon and dragging the slider all the way to the left – which is the Off position.
Of course, when you relaunch the Camera app, Night Mode will be re-activated if the conditions are on the shady side. All this causes unnecessary extra friction when you’re in a rush to snap as shot. Not ideal!
To stop this from happening, launch the Settings app and navigate to Camera. Tap Preserve Settings, and switch the toggle for Night Mode into the green ON position. Doing so tells your iPhone’s Camera app to not re-activate Night Mode when it detects low light.
After you’ve enabled this feature, when you disable Night Mode in the Camera app, it remains disabled. Instead, you’ll need to activate it on a shot-by-shot basis by tapping the Night Mode icon and dragging the slider along to the right.
And while you’re at it, it’s worth noting that you can also preserve the Camera app’s settings for a number of other features, including the camera mode, exposure, and Live Photos.