THE iPHONE NIGHT DARK MODE TENDS TO OPEN UP NIGHT PICTURES to the point where they lose, brightness wise, the inky darkness that characterizes the actual scene. It requires a fair amount of image processing-darkening highlights and mid-tones, dialing back overall brightness and even a slight reduction of contrast-to obtain the night look/feel I want.
The pictures in this post are close to my objective-maybe too much out-of-camera saturation?-but I’ll have to wait until my return to home and my desktop machine to do the heavy-lift processing.