The Pixel’s Night Sight mode is currently available (but hidden)

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Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones take amazing photographs, but a feature coming soon will radically improve low-light pictures via artificial intelligence. It’s called Night Sight, and it uses A.I. and the Pixel’s HDR+ processing to dramatically boost colors and brightness for photos captured in super-dark environments.

Night Sight is a separate mode in the camera app. When you take a photo with it, you’ll have to stay still for an extra second or two because this mode captures more photographs than usual. How do we know? The feature is already present in the latest version of the Google Camera app, and we’ve tried it out. The folks over at XDA Developers were able to pull it out and turn it on as a separate camera app.

If you have a Pixel phone, you can download the modified APK and test it out for yourself by sideloading it. But do keep in mind that this is not the official version, so there might be some kinks, and you’re also installing this app at your own risk. We’ve downloaded the APK and tested Night Sight out on a Google Pixel 3 XL, and haven’t run into any issues.

The results are ridiculously impressive — just take a look. We’ve added a photo of what each image looked like without Night Sight on the Pixel 3 for comparison.

While we can’t comment on Night Sight with finality since this is not an official version, we have a few takeaways. You may not want to use Night Sight in all situations, because it can sometimes take away the ambiance of the environment. It’s pretty aggressive in trying to white balance photos, maybe a little too much. For example, in the restaurant, the subject had pink hues all over her face because that was the only lighting present. Night Sight white balanced the image, so it doesn’t look as atmospheric. This rings true with the selfie of two people — it’s far more white-balanced, and loses the cool pink lighting that made the original photo stand out a bit. We’d still share the Night Sight photos, though, because they’re noticeably sharper.

And that’s a pattern we noticed with Night Sight photos — they often did tend to look sharper and less grainy than normal Pixel 3 photos. That alone may be a worthwhile reason to use it. It’s perfect for those super dark nights when you want to share some kind of a photograph, no matter if the lighting isn’t as accurate as real life.

Night Sight also more often seems to only work in incredibly dark environments, as we sometimes ended up with the same exact image as the normal Pixel 3 camera when there was some decent lighting. This could just be a bug, but we’ll have to wait for the final version to find out.

Night Sight will be coming to the Pixel 3 and 3 XL, Pixel 2 and 2 XL, as well as the original Pixel and Pixel XL, sometime in November.

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