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Indigo's Night Mode
23 September 2025
Last night we stopped babying ourselves over our latest head wound and got out of our easy chair to take a walk around the neighborhood. By the time we resolved to do that, though, the sun had set and darkness had fallen.
Kensington at Night. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max back camera T 15.7mm, f2.8, 1/23 seconds and ISO 1600 captured in Adobe Indigo Night Mode. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw..
As we were rounding the turn to climb the hill home, it occurred to us to make ourselves useful by taking a few shots using Indigo's Night Mode.
Adobe has explained just what Night Mode does:
Night mode uses longer exposure times and captures more images with each shutter press -- up to 1 second x 32 frames if the scene is very dark and the app senses that the phone is on a tripod. If you're handholding the phone, it helps to hold it with two hands, and maybe brace yourself or the phone against an object. Indigo's Night mode will detect the reduced handshake and use longer exposures.
A more subtle difference is that Photo mode has "zero shutter lag". This fancy phrase means that Indigo is constantly capturing raw images while the viewfinder is running.... Night mode does not employ zero shutter lag, but it also uses longer exposures, thereby minimizing imaging noise.
And if the scene warrants it, Indigo suggests you use it. So we did. We took a few shots of buildings with some light on them but this was the winner. Street light on parked cars lining a short hill.
This is not a scene you would consider photographable if you happened upon it. The light value was only 3.5 even with the street lights. A normal outdoor scene might register a light value of 11.5, for comparison. And, uh, we were hand holding the phone, too.
Two things we noticed about the camera image before editing: 1) it was sharp not blurry and 2) it was not at all noisy.
So what did we do in Camera Raw?
We made a slight color adjustment to neutralize the shadows (well, it's all shadows), which were a bit blue. And we cropped it, used some Dehaze out of habit and added a vignette to eliminate some light spill at the bottom from another street light.
Not much, in short.