Modified Google Camera app lets you try Night Sight on your Pixel phone

Google’s announcement of Night Sight for the Pixel 3 at their Made by Google event earlier this month made claims that it could potentially do away with the flash for low-light photography. While Google hasn’t released the feature officially, an enterprising developer has apparently gotten it working.

The Google Camera APK has been modified by XDA-Developer cstark27 and made available to download for users of the Pixel, Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 (and XL models) phones.

Night Sight uses Google’s computational photography algorithms to artificially lighten a dark photo based on information they’ve garnered from checking photo data in low-light images.

Once you’ve installed the modified APK – it will install as a separate app due to a different signing key the developer had to use to get this working – you need to enable Night Sight from the ‘More’ tab in the Camera app. The camera then switches to a moon over the shutter button to indicate you’re in Night Sight mode.

According to XDA-Developers once you have the option for Night mode, you’ll get a nudge to try Night mode if the camera app doesn’t detect enough light in an image. Images captured in Night mode show up in Google Photos with a moon icon in the top right to indicate the use of Night mode.

The XDA-Developers team have used the APK to take some quite compelling before and after shots of the Night Sight Mode – the content isn’t amazing, but the shots show the feature off well. We’ve included some samples here, or you can check out the full album on Flickr.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If you want to try out the APK on your Pixel phone you can side-load the modified APK from the XDA-Developers team through Android File Host here.