It is a thriller. Night time mode is not obtainable in Portrait Mode on the iPhone 17 Professional, and nobody appears to know why. But.
Night time mode routinely brightens pictures and captures extra particulars, even in low-light circumstances. You may alter the publicity time manually. In Portrait mode, the digital camera focuses sharply on the topic you are snapping and blurs the background, making a depth-of-field impact.
The primary clue that Night time mode for Portrait mode was gone got here from an Apple support document titled Take Night time mode pictures together with your iPhone digital camera. It states what many iPhone aficionados already know: “Night time mode routinely brightens pictures and captures extra element in low mild.”
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Night time mode for the iPhone 17 Professional is listed in two separate components of the iPhone on-line person information (here and in addition here) for selfies and time-lapse pictures. Nevertheless it is not included on the guide’s list for snapping Night time mode pictures in Portrait mode. The characteristic remains to be obtainable on iPhone Professional and Professional Max on the 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 sequence.
Upon investigation, CNET staffers verified that, certainly, Night time mode is now not an possibility in Portrait mode with the iPhone 17 Professional.
An Apple consultant did not instantly reply to a request for remark.
When the iPhone 17 Professional was launched in September, Andrew Lanxon, CNET’s lead photographer in Europe, was impressed by the digital camera upgrades over the iPhone 16 Professional, together with optical zoom that doubled to 8x, a telephoto digital camera sensor 56% bigger than earlier than and 48 megapixels of decision.
Lanxon, knowledgeable photographer and YouTuber, was excited to get shooting with the iPhone 17 Pro. However apparently, he should do with out Night time mode in Portrait mode.
Why did Apple do it?
Why was Night time mode eliminated? “There would not look like a {hardware} cause for it,” mentioned CNET senior author Jeff Carlson. “The Lidar digital camera that helps with low-light focusing and depth notion remains to be there. Maybe it is a software program situation, however as of the iOS 26.2 release candidate, the characteristic is not current.”
Carlson discovered it curious that it is taken three months for the reason that launch of the brand new professional mannequin earlier than individuals seen that it is lacking. He speculates that the characteristic was presumably eliminated as a result of it “wasn’t getting used and Apple might dedicate different processing assets elsewhere,” he mentioned. “Maybe one thing broke within the growth of the brand new working system and revamped Digicam app, and it hasn’t been a excessive sufficient precedence to repair within the common launch schedule.
“Individuals have gotten used to having iPhone fashions that allow pictures which can be in any other case tough for smartphone cameras, particularly on a flagship just like the iPhone 17 Professional,” Carlson mentioned. “I hope the characteristic returns to present everybody probably the most management over the pictures they seize.”
One parallel is perhaps what Samsung did earlier this yr — removing S Pen Bluetooth connectivity on the brand new S25 Extremely. Samsung mentioned they eliminated the characteristic as a result of not many individuals have been utilizing it. Is Apple doing the identical factor with Night time mode for portraits?
Some individuals miss it, some do not
A subreddit on the topic gave the impression to be a mixture of “who cares” and “oh darn.” Redditor kaoss_pad was “low key completely satisfied” that the characteristic had vanished, saying that “it could usually shock me and activate after I did not need it and break a second.”
Some Redditors weren’t even conscious of the characteristic. CultofCedar posted, “lol did not even discover that wasn’t a factor,” and Profitable-Cover5433 wrote, “I did not even know you could possibly.”
A few people weren’t completely satisfied concerning the mysterious disappearance, together with nsfdrag, who posted, “Sort of a bummer, I just like the characteristic.”
