Night vision
Night vision camera app for iPhone
Night vision apps are the most over-promised category on the App Store. Here is the line between what a phone camera can do after dark and what needs a tube.
A phone is not an image intensifier
Real night vision multiplies the light that is already there. A photocathode turns photons into electrons, a microchannel plate multiplies them thousands of times, and a phosphor screen turns them back into a picture. That is hardware, it costs more than a phone, and there is no software equivalent.
What a modern phone camera does have is a very good sensor and a lot of processing. In a dim room it genuinely sees more than your eye does, especially if you hold still. In actual darkness it sees nothing, because there is nothing arriving at the sensor.
So the honest description of every night vision app, ours included, is: it brightens what the camera can already see and grades it to look like a tube. Useful in a dim room. Useless in a sealed basement.
Five night looks
NIGHT mode has five treatments, each a different way of reading a low-light scene, all rendered live with the grain and vignette that come with the real thing.
Green phosphor
The classic tube look — monochrome green, bloom on bright points.
Amber phosphor
The warmer variant, easier on the eye over a long session.
Infrared
A cooler, flatter grade closer to what a digital IR camera outputs.
Ghost and UV blacklight
Two further low-light treatments for when you want something stranger.
Questions about the app
- Does it work in total darkness?
- No. Every effect is built from the camera picture, so the camera needs some light to work with. In a dim room it helps; in complete darkness there is nothing to capture.
- Why is the night vision look green?
- Because of the phosphor screen in a real intensifier tube, and because the eye resolves more detail in green at low brightness. We wrote the long version.
- Can I record video at night?
- Yes, with Pro. Video records with sound exactly as the effect looks on screen.