Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can convert an image that was shot during
the day to make it look like it was shot at night using Photoshop.
Before we get started on this tutorial I just want to introduce you to my new book 57 Secrets
for Working Smarter in Photoshop.
This book is available on Amazon.com and it's also available for the Kindle so if you visit
Amazon.com and look up 57 Secrets Photoshop you'll get to my new book.
Now let's get back to the tutorial.
Before we get started with this technique let's have a look and see what it is that
we're trying to achieve.
This is the original image that was shot in Venice during daytime and it has a light fixture
in it.
And what I'm going to do is convert this image and make it look as if it were shot at dusk.
This is a day for night technique which is quite often used in the movies where they'll
shoot an image during or a scene during the daytime and then convert it to make it look
as if it was actually shot at night.
And we're going to do something similar by darkening the area outside the light and actually
lighting this light so it looks as if it is lit.
So let's see how we would go about and achieve that effect.
I have a duplicate of this image stored away so let's just go and get that and we're going
to work on this image.
The first thing I'm going to do is to make a duplicate of the background layer and we're
going to make this a very dark layer so it looks as if this were the sort of night areas.
And we're going to use it for the edges of the image outside the area that is lit by
the light.
To darken this layer I'm going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then Hue/Saturation
and we're going to start by removing some of the saturation from the image.
I'm just going to drag the saturation down to about -50 and now I'm going to do that
for two of the channels as well.
So I'm going to drag the red saturation down and also the yellow saturation down so that's
really, really removing some of the color in the image.
And about -50 something like that will be fine for both those color channels and -50
for the RGB channel as well.
Now we're on our way to creating something that could have been shot at night but I think
it needs to be more contrasty so I'm going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then
Curves because curves is a really good adjustment to apply if you want some additional contrast
in the image.
And I'm going to just drag down on this curve to really boost the contrast particularly
in the areas that I'm going to be interested in seeing a little bit more contrast, a little
bit more detail in.
So I'll click Ok.
And now let's add a photo filter to the image.
We'll choose Image and then Adjustments and Photo Filter.
And the Photo Filter is going to be a sort of bluey color so I'm going to choose Color
and I'm just going to set up the color that I want to use.
And it's 10, 110 and then 150.
And basically it's just sort of a dark or mid turquoise blue.
So I'll click Ok.
And then I'm going to apply this at about 75 percent density so that we're getting a
really dark sort of look to this image.
And I'll click Ok.
So now this could have been shot at nightfall.
And what we want to do now is to light this light.
So I'm going to make another duplicate of this background and I'm going to drag it to
the top.
And now we're going to create this sort of light effect.
And to do this we're going to adjust a curve, again, Image, Adjustment and Curves.
And this time I'm going to drag upwards because I want quite a bit of light in this area where
I'm going to light the background.
And I want a little bit more contrast too so I'm going to drag down on the curve.
A shallowest shape curve like this is always a contrast enhancing curve so I'll click Ok.
And now let's warm this up even a little bit more than it already is with a warming filter.
Image, Adjustments and Photo Filter is a way to add a warming filter to it.
I'm going to choose Warming Filter 81 but you could use either of them.
And I'm going to crank this right up so I think something about 75 really orangey light
here and click Ok.
So this is my dark after dark shot and this is going to be the light bit.
So I want to blend this layer in with the one below and to do that I'm going to add
a mask.
Now at the moment my mask is filled with white.
I can just go and get the Paint Bucket tool here.
I've got black as my foreground color, my mask is targeted, I'm just going to dump that
paint into it.
Now I'm going to get a brush to paint on the mask with.
I'm going to choose a nice soft brush and I want it to be a reasonable size so I'm just
going to enlarge it a bit.
And I want its flow to be very low so I'm going to wind its flow down to about probably
5 or 6 percent, that small an amount.
But I want its opacity to be 100 percent.
And now with the mask targeted I'm going to start picking up the color from the layer
that we're working on.
This mask is black so everywhere I paint with white I'm actually going to bring some detail
back in from the layer that we're working on.
And having such a small flow is really important because we don't want to get a lot of lit
elements.
We want to just work very, very slowly.
Now you're going to work a lot more slowly still than I am.
But what I'm going to do is make sure that I'm getting some nice highlights.
I'm going to click here and Shift click here just to bring up some lightness in the areas
that are raised and that are most likely to capture some of the reflected light from this
light globe.
Now light dissipates very, very fast so it actually disappears really, really quickly
but we can just add a little bit more of an effect in here if we want to.
I think it might catch a bit of light under the eaves here and I also think that we might
get a little bit of light along the top here but not so much underneath that wire.
And if I need to I'm going to adjust the flow down even further.
It was at 6 percent.
I think even 4 percent is going to be a better flow amount.
So I'm just going to continue working around here and this is what you would do and just
pick up the elements that you think are going to be lit a little bit by the globe that we're
going to put in place in just a minute.
So having done that we're ready to go ahead and make our globe.
So I'm going to go back to the original image layer and I'm going to select the Quick Selection
tool.
I'm just going to drag over the glass here.
And I just want to grab these little elements of glass.
And I lost it and I've got the frame in here as well.
So let's go back and just remove the frame by pressing the Alt key as we drag over this
black frame, just making sure that all that we've got selected is the glass itself.
Now you're going to do a much better job of this than I'm currently doing.
So I just really want to get this in pretty fast.
So now that I've got this I'm going to put it on its own layer so I'm going to choose
Layer, New Layer via Copy.
Now this layer is in the middle of the stack so I'm actually just going to drag it to the
very top of the stack and turn everything else back on.
And let's just zoom out so we can see what we've got, again, 125 percent.
So what I've got now is the glass layer on top of everything else.
And I want to use this glass layer to actually add a glow to the image.
So with this glass selected I'm going to choose Image, Adjustments and then Hue/Saturation.
And I want to colorize this so I'm going to click Colorize.
And the colors that I'm going to use are hue at around 50 because I want a sort of orange
color, saturation at about 60, quite a bit of saturation, and lightness at 55, just a
little bit of extra lightness here.
And click Ok.
Now as you can see I've made a pretty poor selection here but that's fine because we're
going to just use that to add an outer glow to the layer.
So with this layer selected I'm going to click on the FX icon here and we're going to add
an outer glow.
So I'm going to click Outer Glow.
I'm going to set the blend mode here to Soft Light and then I'm going to make these settings.
I'm going to set the opacity to about 35 percent so it's a sort of see-through effect and noise
to around 10 percent so there's a little bit of grainy noise being built in here.
The technique is going to be set to Softer, the spread to around 10 percent and then the
work is going to be done by this size because we're going to wind up the size to about 250
pixels.
And now let's set the color and we're going set this to a sort of yellow color 220, green
at 175 and blue at 6.
And there's our sort of orange glow color.
Now while we're in this panel let's go and add an inner glow as well.
So I'm going to click on Inner Glow and I'm going to set this one to Screen blend mode,
I'm going to set the opacity right up and the noise to about 15 percent, again a little
bit of granular appearance happening here.
I'm going to set the technique to Softer, the source to Edge, the choke is going to
be around 10 percent and the size around 2 pixels, just a very small inner glow here.
And the color is going to be set here, and again we're going to go for a sort of yellow
color at 255, 250 and 190, and click Ok and then Ok again.
So this is the effect that we've added to our light but we just need to blur our light
before we go too much further because we don't want this really, really distinct edge.
We want it to be nice and blurred.
So I'm going to choose Filter and then Blur and I'm going to choose a Gaussian Blur.
Gaussian Blur is a sort of go to blur.
It's a really, really good blur for softening things.
And we're going to crank the radius of this light, this glass area, right up.
So I'm going to set it to probably around 25.
You can see that now we're getting a sort of glow effect here in the light.
And I'm going to click Ok.
So there's our light source.
And we're ready now just to build in the globe.
So I'm going to grab the Elliptical Marquee tool and just drag over around about where
the globe is inside this light.
So I'm just going to grab an area that's about that big.
I'm going to add a new layer to the image and I'm going to fill it with white, well
just this little area with white.
I'll press D to get the default colors and X to make white the foreground color.
And I'm just going to press Alt Backspace, Option Delete on Mac, to fill the globe area
with white.
And then I'll choose Select, Deselect because I don't want this selected right now.
Again, we're going to blur this light bulb so that it doesn't look quite so obvious.
So with the layer selected I'm going to choose Filter, Blur and then Gaussian Blur.
And with this blur radius I'm just going to set it to something that's going to soften
the light bulb but not make it too soft.
I think something about like that.
That's about a 6 or a 7 pixel blur.
So I'll click Ok.
And now what I want to do is just to bring forward the front edge of this light because
it would be blocking the globe underneath.
So I'm going to add a layer mask to this layer.
I'm going to pick up black paint.
I'm going to pick up my brush but this time make it really, really small.
I'm using the square bracket keys to do this.
Let's zoom into this area and again back to the brush tool, make sure my mask is targeted
and click and then Shift click and again, just to make sure I've got my flow still set.
That's why it's so slow painting but let's turn the opacity down to about 50 percent
and let's just paint in this area so that we've got this black frame coming back again.
And let's zoom back out again.
So this is our finished effect.
This is the image that we started with shot during the day.
We added a sort of bluey layer to it that would become our nighttime.
Then we added a glow effect around the light.
Then we brought back in the light and actually lit it up and then added a globe into the
middle so it would look as if there were a globe in this socket.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
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