Usually, if you point your iPhone at the sky at night and take a picture with your iPhone, the results aren’t particularly good.
Luckily, a trick from TikToker Abdiel Medina shows how to take photos of the starry sky with the iPhone camera, as long as you have an iPhone 11 or later.
Apple does not offer a specific mode for taking photos of the sky, but with a few adjustments it is possible to achieve good results.
How to take photos of the night sky on the iPhone
- In the darkest area you find, open your camera app.
- Night mode should turn on automatically, but swipe up from the bottom, tap the night mode icon (it’s the circle with the outline of a crescent moon, next to the flash), and set the exposure time to the max. ten seconds (it will probably default to two or three).
- Point your iPhone at the sky and press the camera button to take the photo, then hold it as steady as possible for the full ten seconds. If you can support the iPhone, all the better.
- Tap the photo from the camera roll and hit the “Edit” button at the bottom.
- Move two positions to the right to “Brightness” and turn it down to about -25.
- Scroll three positions to the right to “Contrast” and turn it up to 100.
- Scroll one more position to the right to “Brightness” and lower it to your liking, even going as low as -100 to -80.
Of course, for best results you should avoid street lights and stay as still as possible throughout the entire exposure time.
before and after photography
