Yeah, typically northern lights look like faint white clouds with a little bit of green tint to naked eye. The photos are like those time-exposure photos of the milky way, which is not what the eye sees.
If you ever have the chance to see the Milky way from Namibia, the Andes, the Western Australian desert, you may revise your view there. The dust clouds and star streams extend far out and make it appear like "standing on the bridge of as starship". It looks very 3D. Still not colorful, but immersive and so much detail.
Alas, in the northern hemisphere, we've been pretty good eradicating nighttime darkness (and a lot else besides ...).
In the northern hemisphere, you can enjoy that view - spectacularly - from Mauna Kea. I had never before realized that you could perceive depth in the sky.
You should try seeing the milky way from the middle of an ocean sometime - most folks have never been far enough from light pollution to really see it as it used to be.
It really does look like a river of starlight across the sky, once you are a few hundred miles away from shore.
In addition to the intensity of the Solar activity, location matters, especially nowadays.
The auroras won't be super vivid near larger cities in Central Europe, with a lot of light around you. It's just not north enough and not dark enough. Up north, rural Lapland or so, it can get very vivid during a winter.
Cameras tend to add their extra though.
A surprising thing to me was how the aurora can sometimes be still and sometimes move so fast. It is a strange experience. One would expect something that covers such a large part of the visible sky-dome to move slowly, but instead it can swipe around quite quickly ("like a fox's tail").
While they "typically" look like that, because most often they're quite weak, I wouldn't compare it to milky way photos. If it's strong, especially if you're up north and somewhere with little light pollution, what you see is comparable to lots of pictures.
