Nightography: Low Light Photography and the S22 series

Low light photos – the bane of most everyone’s existence when they’re trying to take a photo. Why is it so difficult to take the photo that you want to take in lower light conditions? Without pulling out the dreaded flash?! (I say that because I personally dislike the look of flash-on photography; I know some people who absolutely prefer it).

It’s because you’re hitting the point where what you see with your eye adapts to the amount of light in the space a lot better than the range and ability to capture light in the technology of most lenses. What you can see plainly with your eye is actually not that much light for a camera lens to work with. 

With the Samsung S22 Series, Samsung pushed the boundaries with low ligth photography but it looks like with the S23 Series, especially the S23 Ultra, Samsung's climbed new heights with a 200MP camera, Pro Mode in the front camera and of course Nightography.

So what’s new with the lenses? 

For the S22 and S22+, the main lens pixel sensor is 23% larger than the S21/S21+  , allowing more light to come into the lens itself, like the S22 Ultra 108MP sensor when compared to the S21 Ultra. There’s also the Super Clear lens, new with the S22 series, that’s crafted using Corning Gorilla Glass DX, which improves the anti-reflectivity and scratch resistance of the camera lens.  

Of course, though the big improvements here are with the technology behind the camera, and the way the processor and the photo work together to create something amazing. 

With the S22 series, the features include improvements both due to the processor and to the algorithms and processes the processor allows for. 

The processor the S22 series uses is 4nm. Why does that matter? Many chips have 5,7 or even 9 nanometers – and this is one specification that should be better as it gets closer to 0 – that’s because nanometers are a measurement of atomic distance, and while there’s a more complicated answer, the simple answer is this – lower nanometers is good because it typically means the internal wiring is smaller, which means electrons can get where they need to get to do the thing they need to do faster.

For example, the enhanced AI in the S22 series can process 4x more data than the S21 series to sharpen the details of the images you take in Night Mode.  

The 4nm processor is one of the main reasons why so many of these improvements in computational photography are possible for the S22 series.    

From my own experience, one of the big difficulties taking photos in low light conditions is getting an angle or a trick of the light or another artistic way to be able to clearly tell the difference between the subject of the photo and the background – colours and shapes can get easily confused  because colour gets lost when the light is low in the photo.

So Samsung has built some new elements into their image processing to make your night photos stand out from the crowd.  

There are two improvements that do just that – there’s new AI for a particular algorithm to identify objects to capture true shape and colour tones and reduce noise (in the photograph) in low light situations. And then there’s what’s called a stereo depth map, which uses machine learning and other AI elements to cleanly add in soft focus in portrait mode, by specifically targeting small details like hair and making sure they’re well defined and understood as a part of the subject of the photo -  pet or person. 

Both the S22 and S22+ have easy to use editing tools that allow you to edit the light easily in your photos, and the S22 Ultra has the added feature of a new RAW editing app, Expert RAW, which at the time of writing is sold separately via the Galaxy store.    

For all the night owls and pub crawlers out there, the S22 series may be just the right fit for you.