In the last 10 years, smartphone photography has improved significantly due to advancement in innovations in camera hardware, computational imaging and AI.

However, capturing good photographs in low light has always been a challenge, until Samsung Electronics introduced its revolutionary Nightography feature.

First unveiled in the Galaxy S22 series, Galaxy users now enjoy more vivid and highly optimized photos, even in the dark, with enhanced Nightogaphy for the Galaxy S23 series.

John Seok-Jun Lee, Head of Computational Camera Part at Samsung Research America (SRA), and Narasimha Gopalakrishna Pai, Head of AI Computational Imaging Part at Samsung R&D Institute India-Bangalore (SRI-B), say the Nightography they jointly developed allows for crisp photos and videos from dusk to dawn.

Nightography helps Samsung S23 smartphone users to take vivid photos in low-light environments.

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The S23 camera captures a series of images with different brightness levels, then applies multi-frame processing (MFP) technology to them.

The technology analyzes the images, removes the frames with noise or blur, and then combines the remaining frames into a single clear shot with HDR.

Then an AI-powered ISP algorithm on NPU enhances the color, tone and details in the photo.


Nightography photo quality on the Galaxy S23 has greatly improved with more brightness while controlling the noise, clarity and saturation around light sources, like neon signboards, by leveraging the exclusive snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for the Galaxy S23 series.

The R&D Revolution: How did MPI and SRI-B Collaborate to Develop Nightography?

SRA’s mobile processor innovation lab created several algorithms to overcome the challenges of taking photos in low light environments.

By analyzing and merging multiple captured inputs, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and dynamic range are improved and blur caused by camera or object motions is optimized.

To remove high noise levels and enhance photo details further, SRA MPI also collaborated with MX Visual Solution Team to develop and optimize the AI image signal processing (ISP).


SRI-B was responsible for the algorithm pipeline development, optimization and AI model acceleration using all available compute units on the platform via multicore CPU, NPU and GPU.

SRI-B also developed an AI denoising module that reduces motion blur in the final output. SRI-B also created ‘Night portrait’ for the Galaxy S23 selfie camera, which captures night photos with beautiful color blooms.

Getting Hands-on with Nightography

In the future, the number of pixels in a smartphone camera will continue to increase and SRA MPI plans to solve the problem of low light photography in high mega-pixel cameras through next-generation AI MFP technology.

Samsung plans to increase the quality of video nightography to match photo nightography to enhance user experience and continue to improve expert RAW across all image resolutions.

Starting with the Galaxy S23 series, Samsung plans to further explore how it can apply the power of Nightography to other premium devices.