Turn a daytime shot into a night time shot…

Fotoszkoła

robchenski, czw., 09/04/2009 - 13:34

Too busy watching television to shoot landscapes by night? This step by step project shows you how to turn day into night using Photoshop’s layer blending options and adjustment layers. The technique will also work with pretty much any application that supports layers, (such as Paint Shop Pro).

Level: intermediate to advanced.

Step 1

Choose the picture you want to work on and open it in Photoshop. This effect works with pretty much any kind of scenic shot, but you’ll need to fine tune some of the steps to get it right for the picture you’ve chosen. If you want to follow the steps using the same shot as we have, click on the thumbnail above this text and download the image.

Step 2

We’ll start with the overall tone of the picture. Night scenes tend to have virtually no colour information, and a strong blue cast. Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. Click on OK when the new layer dialog appears and try the following settings in the Hue/Saturation dialog, (with the Colorize option ticked); Hue 230, Saturation 35, Lightness 40.
Experiment until you get the right mood.

Step 3

Now to add the moon.
If you don’t have your own shot of the moon you can use this one, (click on the thumbnail above to open it). Drag it onto your main image using the Move tool and it will appear as a new layer.

Step 4

We could select and delete the sky part of the moon layer, but I’ve chosen to take advantage of the fact it is totally black and use the Layer Blending Options. Double click on the new (moon) layer and when the Layer Style window appears you will see the Blending Options pane appear. Move the shadow slider on the ‘This Layer’ scale a little to the right as shown above. You will see the black part of the layer disappear.

Step 5

We also want to make sure the moon looks like it is behind the trees, not in front of them. Move the shadow slider for the underlying layer a small amount to the right. Now hold down the Alt key to split the slider and drag it a little further along the scale as shown above. Once you’ve got it right you should see the darkest parts of the original scene, (the branches of the tree), showing through.

Step 6

Now to add some 'moon lighting'. There are several ways to do this, including using Layer Blending Options or the dodge tool, but we’re going to use perhaps the easiest method. Start by creating a new transparent layer above the adjustment layer created in step 1, (putting it here means we can see what we are doing properly). Using the paintbrush tool choose a large soft brush and 100% white paint and paint onto the new blank layer roughly where you want your moonlight to fall.

Step 7

Change the opacity of the new (painted) layer to around 60-70% and the blend mode to Overlay. This has the effect of lightening the mid tones and highlights whilst leaving the shadow area virtually untouched. You should now also move the moonlight layer down below the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. You can now edit the ‘moonlight’ layer for the most realistic effect using the paintbrush and eraser tools. Also try experimenting with different opacities and blend modes for the ‘moonlight’ layer.

Step 8

Select the background layer and choose the Burn tool from the Toolbar. In the Options bar choose a large soft brush and set the range to ‘Shadows’. Use sweeping strokes to darken the top and bottom of the image.

Step 9

Finally, if you want to add some subtle cloud detail you can. Add a sky as a new layer and increase the contrast using levels so the blue sky goes as near to black as you can get it. You should be able to get the clouds to overlay your image using the same method described in step 4. Give it a try!

Step 10

The end result after flattening the layers and tweaking the contrast using Curves and the colour using Hue/ Saturation again.

Projekty krok po kroku

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Napisał(a) Phil Turner

Data pt., 22/05/2009 - 19:44

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Just tried this with some degree of success using Serif Photoplus X2. Results not good enough to publish but will try another soon.

Thanks for posting this technique......Good fun

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http://www.myfinepix.co.uk/competition/entry/416314

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Napisał(a) williamwhittle

Data czw., 01/10/2009 - 11:59

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when this project was on the old my fuji website it had a step by step picture guide aswell! with the picture guide made the whole thing really easy to follow, can you not add the step by step pictures like before which makes it a 1000 times easier to follow for people like me without a clue.

its only a 1 star compared to the orriginal myfuji version which is 5 star guide