I am interested in post-processing techniques of turning a photo taken during the day into a moody, night shot. I have seen several beautiful examples of that where the result was remarkable. I know that you can use exposure, black, shadow and such sliders in different software to manipulate how dark the image is. But I think there must be much more to that.

 

It would be very interesting to hear from those that have done this sort of stuff and, of course, are willing to share their knowledge what steps they are using, tips and tricks with layers perhaps, changing mood with cool colors, adding moon glow, etc?

 

Since we have a gallery here, maybe that could be a great place to showcase "before" and "after" photos?

This could be quite fun!

 

cheers

Roman

A wonderful topic! I do it periodically with B&W pictures, not really with color ones. The Gallery is not a good idea, I'd say, for two reasons:

- It can hold only 30 pictures currently, and the old ones will disappear.

- Not everybody would like to display a before and after in their profile for everybody to see. It would be another matter if we are able to hide pictures in the future.

For now external links seem the best.

 

I'll be sure to return to this topic later.

 

Anna

Yes, you are right Anna... former functionality of being able to attach photos directly to a post would be very useful here, let's hope it will come back.

This is a day for night shot, not the best and most dramatic, but it was shot in daylight and processed to look like moonlight:

 

http://www.clydebeamer.com/2009/09/a-prickly-night/

 

Mostly done with color balance/temp and tone curve.

I like your B&W Gallery, Clyde. Great work.

I've got a pretty straightforward one.

 

http://wdv-photography.weebly.com/1/post/2013/04/turning-day-into-night.html

 

The difficult bit in turning daytime shots into night time, is that one can take out the light, but the shape and hardness of shadows often give it away. Old westerns sometimes have night scenes that are shot during the day, but with a ND filter.

Thanks Willem, great example. So, would you say that neutral density filter would be one tool use for this?

 

Not really

A ND filter darkens the entire range including the highlights. What I did was moving up the "cut off" for the dark / shades and darkening the midtones, but leaving the highlights unaltererd. So what I did was a bit more selective. What I do use ND filters for is being able to work with longer shutterspeeds without having to close the aperture too much. That helps me in getting motionblur and zoomblur

 

As you talk about shooting too. It isn't necessary to shoot at night or to postprocess completely.

 

The following one

http://1x.com/photo/35334/

Is made at daytime in the sun. In the tutorial I wrote how I did it, mainly with flashes brighter than daylight and an exposure adjusted to the flashes.

 

In b/w convertion I adjusted some colors and the levels and curves but the main tasks were done in capturing.

 

Christoph

 

Mixed light like Christoph writes has even more options if you make color pictures.

 

Not only in isolating the 'flashed subject' by underexposing the ambient light, and using the right exposure for the flashlight, but also in playing with selective color temperature.

Setting the color temperature for the ambient daylight for instance to get a very cool blue atmosphere and using a gel on the flash to get a more neutral color temperature.

 

I must put that on my 'to do' list to experiment with myself ....

 

Cheers

 

Thanks Christoph, this is a beautiful and moody photograph and a perfect example of what I had in mind.

 

hm... somehow I can't get to the tutorial, the picture, comments and info display fine, but when I click tutorial... the three dots are spinning forever...

 

I'm really looking forward to reading it...

I really don´t use to save the steps of my processing images, but I can post here the after / before process of one of my images.

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=364561436988805&set=a.328621043916178.68100.181527405292210&type=1&theater

 

Because you will see the image in Facebook, I recommend that you click the arrow in the top right for better appreciation.

 

Thanks.