Deep Fusion takes an underexposed photo for sharpness, and blends that with three neutral pictures and a long high-exposure image on a per-pixel level to achieve a highly customized result. The machine learning system examines the context of the picture to understand where a pixel sits on the frequency spectrum. Pixels for clouds will be treated differently than those for skin, for example. After that, the technology grabs structure and tonality based on ratios.

There are some gotchas. You can’t use this with your phone’s ultra-wide angle lens, as hinted earlier, and bright telephoto shots will revert to Smart HDR to maintain better exposure. The capture process is quick, but it’ll take a second for your iPhone to process the image at full quality. And yes, you absolutely need a 2019 iPhone for this to work — it’s dependent on the A13 chip.

You’ll have to wait until the general release of iOS 13.2 if you’re not willing to experiment. Even so, this could represent a minor coup for Apple. The company has been accused of slipping on photography in the past, letting AI-centric phone cameras like Google’s pull ahead. Although the iPhone 11 series made strides in photo quality out of the box (particularly with its Night Mode), Deep Fusion gives Apple an AI-powered camera feature that boosts quality further and might provide an edge over rivals in key scenarios.

As Schiller explained, when you’re about to take an image with the new iPhone 11 Pro, the camera will snap 8 images before you press the shutter. When you do, it’ll then take one long exposure, and will then stitch a new image together, “pixel-by-pixel” to create one with lots of detail and very little noise.

It’s not specifically designed for shooting in the dark, but it’s clear that Apple is parking its tanks on Google’s lawn. Night Sight has been one of the strengths of the last few Pixel phones, using machine learning to create well-lit images in dark environments.

Schiller didn’t say when exactly we could expect Deep Fusion, but that it’ll arrive on devices in the coming months. Given the looming announcement of the Pixel 4, it’ll be very interesting to see if Google already has the next generation of its own technology ready to return fire.