Changing bright photo into night

[Silenzio]

Hi!

Learning my ropes around Photoshop. I'm doing a day to night conversion of this picture, but I'm having a lot of trouble with it... I've messed around a bit with brightness, contrast, saturation, levels, curves etc., but I'm especially having trouble with the overexposed edges.

I don't need someone to do the job, but I'd like to have a few tips on how to do this. Thanks!


Clean, uncropped picture:

 

[ALB68]

You need to learn the ropes with ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). Open your jpg there first and move your exposure sliders, black and white sliders until you get the right darkness effect. Then go to PS and create some light sources such as stars in the sky, window lighting etc. I simply lighted the windows by masking them and adding a Brightness/ Contrast layer and then jack up the brightness. Maybe you want something like this. (Also added a Hue/Sat layer to the sky that I had masked)

 

[Silenzio]

Thank you, but the buildings are blurry and there's a lot of odd yellow in there. How would I fix this ?

 

[ALB68]

Try putting on a Selective Color adjustment layer. You'll just have to experiment with the channels to get what you want there, and then apply it selectively and experiment with your blending modes. Try the yellow first or maybe the blue, move your sliders and watch the effect it is having, if your not getting anything, try another one.
You could also do it with a Hue/Contrast layer. Lots of different ways.

Edit: Here it is using Selective Color. I just put an rectangular mask around the building area and applied Selective Color-Yellows- then yellow-45, cyan -29 and black -2 with it set to Absolute.
This is the result of that combo

 

[ALB68]

Sharpen it using Unsharp Mask.

 

[iDad]

I suggest taking a photo at night from that same angle maybe overlaying it, that original photos to washed out, too low-resolution to try to do anything with not worth the headache.. just my opinion

 

[Tom Mann]

Sharpen it using Unsharp Mask.

NO! This is bad advice.

a) The original image is already sharp enough; and,

b) Most night pix have excess contrast, so sharpening them reallllly brings out halos and other artifacts (such as seen around most of the edges in your first tweaked version, ALB).


Tom M

 

[iDad]

I can see Tom saying NOOOOOOO! on that one:banghead: LMAO

 

[ALB68]

I defer to the master. If he said it, you better believe it! Otherwise you will go to graphics jail as he is our chief of police.

NO! This is bad advice.a) The original image is already sharp enough; and,b) Most night pix have excess contrast, so sharpening them reallllly brings out halos and other artifacts (such as seen around most of the edges in your first tweaked version, ALB).Tom M

 

[Silenzio]

I ended up changing plans, so this isn't needed anymore. Thanks for your help anyways .