How to Photograph Christmas Lights on a Samsung Galaxy

Auto mode will either obliterate the Christmas tree with an ugly shadowless flash or else the camera will expose for the darker room and the lights will appear as large white blobs. Turn off the flash, choose the mode most appropriate for the scene and set the white balance manually, and you’ll find that your Galaxy is quite capable of coping with Christmas lights.

Christmas light settings for each scene

These are a good place to start, but you’ll need to make some changes depending on what you see on your phone’s screen. The camera settings below are for the main camera (1x). If your shutter speed is slower than about 1/15 second, you should use a tripod or steady your phone against something.

Tree lights indoors

Turn off your phone’s flash, since it’s too strong for the task at hand, as it blows out the foreground and leaves everything else in shadow. Samsung’s low-light guide notes that Night mode stops the flash from firing, so it’s the easiest place to start with a tree.

Try Night mode, which you can find under More in the modes bar. Newer phones, like those in the S26 series, will have a moon icon for this when in Photo mode. On a Galaxy S25 Ultra running One UI 9 (checked in November 2026), Night sits in the modes bar next to Photo, and in a dim room a dedicated button for taking Night photos appears in the viewfinder. Night mode takes multiple photos and stitches them together to reduce noise, so keep your phone steady or prop it up on a shelf until it’s finished taking the picture. If you’re taking photos of your tree in a dim room, it’s a good idea to leave a light on. Otherwise, you’ll just have little dots of light in an otherwise pitch-black photo.

For more control, you can use Pro mode and tweak the settings yourself. If your string lights have a warm colour tone, like those from incandescent bulbs (which typically have a colour temperature of 2700K, per Consumer Reports), you may need to increase the Kelvin amount in Pro mode to around 3200 to 3500K to preserve that effect. Otherwise, your phone’s Auto white balance setting may make the lights appear whiter than they do in person. The white balance guide explains how the Kelvin slider works.

Flickering lights can leave black lines in photos, so try a shutter speed of 1/60s or 1/30s to help with that. (Samsung’s page on fixing blurry photos recommends using a shutter speed of 1/120s or slower if you’re having this problem.) Not familiar with Pro mode? No worries, our Pro mode guide explains all the controls!

Bokeh from tree lights

A soft-focus Christmas tree with a pin-sharp bauble or mug is a popular Christmas image. A Galaxy gives you two ways to get it. Portrait mode blurs the background in software, while the telephoto lens blurs it optically when the subject is close and the lights are far behind.

One way to get there with a Galaxy is to shoot in Portrait mode with the Blur effect switched on. Slide the Blur setting to taste. The software-based blur effect copes best with solid objects, like baubles or mugs. Intricate edges, think pine needles, may turn ragged. The effect works best if the tree is several metres behind your mug or bauble as it makes the depth-mapping process easier.

If you want to optically blur the lights, shoot your close-up with the 3x or 5x camera as near to the bauble as the lens will allow, and keep the lights as far behind it as possible. Note that the minimum focusing distance for the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s 5x camera is listed as 80cm on Samsung’s website, although GSMArena found it could focus on objects about 52cm away. The Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 5x camera copes with closer objects, specifically 30cm according to Samsung and about 26cm according to GSMArena. If your bauble isn’t in focus, try moving backwards or use the 3x camera instead. The S26 Ultra zoom guide gives you an idea of which lens you’d use at each distance.

Or you can just optically blur the fairy lights for effect, without featuring a mug or bauble. In Pro mode, switch focus to manual and drag the slider toward the close-up end, and the whole tree dissolves into discs of colour. Bokeh explained goes further into how out-of-focus light behaves.

Outdoor displays at blue hour and after dark

Say you're photographing a street at mid-latitudes shortly after sunset. For the next 20 or 30 minutes or so, the streetlights and other lights will show up nicely against a deep blue sky.

An hour later, though, the same lights will stick out oddly against a black sky, and you'll lose much of the appearance of the surrounding architecture.

Pro: For consistent shots (once your phone is on a tripod), use Pro mode so you can manually set your white balance (around 4000K keeps the sky blue and the bulbs warm) and shoot at ISO 50 to 100 with long shutter speeds (try 1/4 second and work your way up to 2 seconds as it gets darker). Take a photo every couple of minutes with your phone set on a tripod, because the colour of the sky and brightness of the lights change fairly quickly during twilight.

Handheld: Use Night mode, since it’ll select an appropriate exposure and combine multiple photos to reduce noise. Using Night mode instead of Pro mode lets you walk around a market and take clean photos without a tripod. Exposure is the process of determining how much light should be let onto the sensor, and our Night mode guide tells you how Night mode makes that decision.

Light trails and slow shutter speeds

Samsung recommends light trails as an ideal Pro mode scenario in its low-light photography tips. Longer exposures allow you to capture the full length of light trails from passing cars, so try extending the shutter speed further if your Galaxy phone’s Pro mode offers this option. It is possible to expose for up to 30 seconds on Samsung’s flagship Galaxy phones, although some Galaxy A and M series phones cap out at 10 seconds.

Set up your Galaxy phone on a tripod, drop the ISO as low as it will go and try 2 seconds initially, before extending to 4 or 8 seconds to create more dramatic effects. Samsung’s Galaxy phones have a wide, fixed aperture that lets in a lot of light, so you may find that brightly lit shop windows clip before the light trails get long enough. An experimental neutral density (ND) filter effect added to Expert RAW in 2023 (under Expert RAW Labs in its settings) might help here by cutting the light.

Turn on a two-second self-timer to avoid camera shake when capturing light trails using longer exposures. A static point in a shot of light streaks will help emphasise the movement, so keep an eye out for illuminated trees or brightly lit shop fronts. One week later, you can use the same tripod setup for New Year's Eve fireworks.

People in front of the lights

For portraits, position people two or three metres in front of the tree and leave a bit more space behind subjects than in front, because in Portrait mode this will help turn fairy lights into pretty discs of light rather than ‘horns’ protruding from people’s heads!

The fairy lights won’t illuminate your subject’s face as they’re quite small and don’t emit much light towards the camera. Try to introduce some extra light in the scene, as a lamp to one side or the door left open to a lighted room will help stop your camera resorting to high ISO settings. Avoid using flash as this tends to wash out facial features and reduce the pretty fairy lights effect to pinpricks.

If you’re shooting groups or busier scenes, try Night mode instead of Portrait mode, but ask people to remain still for a few seconds until the shot’s been taken.

Snow and frost under the lights

Snow reflects a lot of light, so your phone’s camera may struggle to get the exposure right, making it look less than dazzlingly white. In Pro shooting mode, set the ISO and shutter speed to Auto, then increase the exposure compensation (EV) until the image looks correct. You can also set the exposure level in Photo mode via Quick controls, and the One UI 9 Tips app says that value stays set for the mode. In either case, it’s best to start with a value of +1 (or higher if it’s very sunny) and see how it looks. Snow guides for dedicated cameras suggest the same starting point.

Try getting in really close to frost that’s formed on car roofs or windows and focusing on the intricate patterns. Coloured lights may reflect off the crystals and add interest to your shots.

Falling snow can look great lit up by street lights, but you’ll need to experiment with different shutter speeds to get the effect you’re after. Slow shutter speeds will blur the snowflakes into long streaks, but a faster shutter speed of 1/250s or more will freeze them in mid-air (you may need to increase the ISO setting to compensate).

In cold conditions, it’s best to keep your phone in a pocket close to your body when you’re not actively taking pictures, as batteries don’t like the cold and Samsung says that Galaxy phones work best at temperatures between 0 and 35°C and could switch off without warning if used below freezing point. Before you take your phone back indoors, pop it into a plastic zip bag for a while to prevent condensation building up on the camera lenses (it’ll condense on the bag instead).

Why your phone can't make starbursts

On a camera with a changeable aperture, you can create starbursts by shooting at a small aperture (like f/16). Light diffracts, or bends, around the edges of the aperture blades, which creates lines around points of light.

Current Galaxy phones have a wide-open aperture that can’t be adjusted (for reference, the S26 Ultra’s main camera has an f/1.4 aperture and its 5x camera has an f/2.9 aperture, according to GSMArena’s spec sheet for the phone). Without the ability to stop down, street lamps will appear as orbs of light instead of spiky stars.

Portrait mode doesn’t create starbursts either. On Samsung’s support page about Galaxy phone Portrait mode, the available Portrait photo effects are listed as Blur, Studio, High-key mono, Low-key mono, Backdrop and Color point.

If you use a clip-on star filter over your lens, Galaxy phones can shoot starbursts. Make sure your camera lens is clean first, though: smudges and fingerprints will make lights blurry and hazy.