Hi! Adam Robert Young here, and today I'm going to show you how to make a day to night
photograph just like this one. It's easier than you think. I'm a Brisbane-based photographer
and one thing I really love is tutoring and mentoring photography enthusiasts to take
better photos and do better work in their post-production. In order to make a day to
night photograph, you need to start with a number of images, but at a bare minimum, you
can use just two, and I'm gonna use two images to show you how to do it today. As you want
those two images to be positioned exactly the same, it's best to set up your camera
on a tripod, and try to not move it at all. Take one photo at daytime, one photo when
it's nighttime. That's a bare minimum, you can work with more than that, but today we're
just gonna be looking at two images. So, how do you do it once you've got those photos?
Well, I'm gonna take you into Lightroom. Let's just say you've taken a bunch of photos, so
what you wanna do is pick two that you think are gonna look really good in the day to night
photo. I've got a bunch of photos here in Lightroom and I've selected two that I'm going
to export into Photoshop to make my day to night photograph. Now the great thing is that
you can actually export them together into one image as two separate layers. That'll
make your job a lot easier. So all you need to do that is select the two photos, so click
on one, control click on the other one, or command click if you're on a Mac, and then
right click on them, go up to Edit In, and then down to Open as Layers in Photoshop,
and what that'll do is then send them both to Photoshop together in the one image as
two different layers. OK, so we're in Photoshop now. And as you can see here, on the bottom
layer is the nighttime image, and on the top layer is the daytime image. So how do we blend
the two together? Well, it's actually really simple. What we need to do is add a layer
mask to the top layer. We can do that by just clicking this little one down here. And now
you can see there's a white layer mask on the top layer. Now white means that the top
layer is going to be 100% opaque, that is, you can't see anything below it. So nighttime
layer is below, daytime layer is above. Now if we change the colour of that layer mask
from white to black, then you'll see that the top layer now is completely invisible,
and you can see the bottom layer even though both of them are officially visible, because
of that layer mask, there is 0% opacity on the top layer, which lets through all of the
below layer. I'll just switch that back. What we can do to blend the two is come over here
to the left-hand side and use a gradient, and put that gradient on top of the layer
mask. And what that will do is change the opacity of the top image from fully-opaque
to fully-invisible. Just to demonstrate that, let me take a way the bottom layer - I'm gonna
hide the bottom layer - and I'm gonna just draw a gradient across the top image on that
layer mask. And you can see that at the right-hand side you can see all of the image, and at
the left-hand side it's completely disappeared. Now with the nighttime layer below it, what
that's going to do is then blend from daytime to nighttime as the nighttime becomes more
and more visible under the top layer. So, I'm actually not going to show you that right
now because we need to talk about the gradient itself a little bit to fully understand it,
and then we'll see the effect. So let me undo that. Now, when you're choosing the gradient,
the direction you're drawing it will go from white to black, that is, fully opaque to fully
invisible. So you need to work out which part of the image you want to be daytime, and which
part you want to be nighttime. And so looking at this image, I think that the bridge definitely
looks cooler in the nighttime part, so I want this side, the left-hand side, to be nighttime,
and I want the right-hand side to be daytime. So what I'm going to do is draw my gradient
from right to left. So let's do that. Do do do do do do. And BAM! There you go. So you
can see that there's a very very gradual shift from the daytime to nighttime and it's completely
seamless and look at how easy that was! Now of course, the thing to know about the gradient
is that that line that you're drawing is going to be the area that shifts from black to white,
so if it's a very short line, say, from here to here, the right-hand side of the line all
the way across to the right will be fully opaque, from the left-hand side of the line
to anywhere to the left will be fully invisible, and the graduation, that change from fully
opaque to fully invisible is just going to be that very small area of the line. So let's
lift off and show you that. So you can see that's not what we want. So what you really
wanna do is have a really long line that's going to very gradually blend from one level
of light to the other. Gradual shift, very long line is gonna be a gradual transition.
And you can play around with doing it different ways, you can try different angles to get,
you know, I mean, that looks, I think that looks a bit silly that way, I think the best
way is fully vertical, but you know, it's up to you. You can play around with... you
know, you can even have, you could have the top being daytime and the bottom being nighttime.
So there's a whole lot of different things you can play around with. It's a lot of fun.
But I like to stick to this. Let me just do that a little... There we go. I mean, you
could even have more nighttime. You can have more daytime. Just play around with it and
see what's the combination that you like. For me, something like that I think looks
best. So that's how you do it. Open it in Lightroom, import it into Photoshop as two
layers of the same photo, put on a layer mask, and then gradient over the layer. That's all
there is to it. It is so simple. So you can see that a lot of people may want to protect
that as a, you know, so that they can look like Photoshop geniuses for doing these photos
but it is such a simple thing. Now if you want to see more photography-related tutorials
on this YouTube channel, let me know in the comments, and also be sure to subscribe and
like this video if you found this really helpful. Let me know how you did when you gave this
a go yourself. I'd love to see the results. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next
time.