I’ve been on the hunt for a good tutorial demonstrating how to turn daytime images into nighttime images and I think I’ve finally found a few good ones to share forward… I actually use this technique a lot in my compositing. I rarely shoot at night because it is so easy to change day into night in Photoshop without the draw-backs of night-time shooting (i.e. noisy grainy images, long shutter speeds)… The following images were all daytime shots that were shifted into night scenes in post. To show you how effective these techniques are I posted the before and afters below. There is only one little difference between how I do this and how these tutorials demonstrate and that is, I create this shift in light in stages. Meaning I don’t do the darkening in one adjustment layer. I darken a little bit at a time and adjust the shadows and highlights with masks and dodge and burn as I go. Here is the Princess & the Dragon before I adjusted the lighting… As you can see in this snapshot of my image layers, this shift in light was done using five separate curves adjustment layers. Each mask is a little different because I was adjusting the lighting and shadows as I stepped down.
The final darkening effect was this… The change is quite dramatic.
I used the same day into night effect in “The Spirit of Halloween”. Here is the shot of the field I used in the image. This was taken about 1-2 hours before sundown…
Here is the field after using curves adjustments, swapping out the sky for a night sky and adding the moon, along with masking and dodge/burn…
Here is the final image…

I actually want to share forward two tutorials. I believe that will give you a much better understanding of how it is done. A huge thank you to Glyn Dewis and Adrian Scheff for their awesome tutorials on this technique! Thank you guys for #SharingItForward! Tutorial #1: Change the Time of Day with Photoshop

Tutorial #2: Turning Day into Night by Glyn Dewis

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