Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Day to Night Processing

1. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Day to Night Effect - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Light-room for Lunch, turning day into night. Seriously, this is one of the most exciting effects that I do and really loved to teach it. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch itself is a series of classes, every one of which teaches one or two techniques that you can apply using Adobe Camera Raw as it comes in Photoshop or the developed module in lightroom. Today we're looking at turning daytime images into nighttime images. I'm going to give you these two images so that you can go and practice along with me. What we're going to do is look a little bit at what an image that is shot at night time is going to look like, and we're going to take daytime images and turn them into nighttime images. Now, this is a similar thing to what filmmakers do, because quite often they will shoot nighttime scenes in midday, because it just works that way. They're able to change the lights so that you think that you're watching a movie that's been shot after dark, but in fact it was shot in mid day. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please if you're enjoying the class do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. Those recommendations help other students at Skillshare to see that this is a class that they too might like. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your course projects. If you're already now we're going to start in Adobe Camera Raw, and then the second set of videos is going to be for Lightroom and we're going to turn day into night. 2. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - ACR Day to Night Edit: For the first image, I'm going to use Adobe Camera Raw and it happens to be a JPEG image. If we want to open a JPEG image in Adobe Camera Raw, this is one way of doing it. Launch Photoshop first and then choose "File and Open As." When you select "Open As," you can select an image to open just the same way as you could in the Open dialog, but there's a difference. Down here in the bottom corner of the "Dialog" is a selection of options and you can tell Photoshop what you want to treat the image as, and here we're going to select "Camera Raw." What we're saying to Photoshop is, even though this is a JPEG image, we want you to treat this as if it were a Camera Raw image, and if it's a Camera Raw image, then it has to be opened first inside Adobe Camera Raw because it can't be taken direct to Photoshop. Here's the image we are going to be working with. The first thing I'm going to do is remove this great swag of sky because it's going to take us a lot of effort to get that sky down and we don't really need it, because it's not actually critical for this image. I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of the sky to start off with. Then for a day for night look, we have to create the impression that this is night time, and the simplest way is just to start working on exposure. But you know, at night things tend to take on a blue tint. So we're going to adjust the temperature towards blue, and that's going to give us a blue tint to this image. Also at night contrast tends to be decreased. So I'm going to wind down contrast. The problem with winding down contrast is that, just adjust the exposure all over again, we're going to have to compensate with a bit less exposure. We still got the sky hem, we've got still some detail here that I want to get rid of. We're going do that with Graduated Filter, I'm going to click on the "Graduated Filter." It needs to have some settings in it, but right now they're no where near what I need. I'm going to click the hamburger icon here, "Reset Local Settings." I'm going to add some blue and I'm going to add some lack of exposure or reduced exposure here, and then just add my Graduated Filter. I'm holding "Shift" so it will drag in a perfectly downward straight direction. Now, if you're working in Lightroom, you will know that with the Graduated Filter you don't have to make some settings before you add it to a document, that's not so in Adobe Camera Raw, there have to be some settings applied to it before you can actually get it into your document. Here is my Graduated Filter. The problem is that, it hasn't really totally killed the sky and it's totally killed my building. We now have a Brush Tool here in Adobe Camera Raw, and I'm going to click the "Minus button" here. It's also available in the most recent version of Lightroom, and this allows me to remove areas from the impact of this Graduated Filter. Instead of this straight line, I'd like to see a little bit extra of the building here. I can add a second Graduated Filter if I want to. I can click here on "New" and go and add a second one with pretty much the same settings as the first. Button up when the back off exposure a little bit. But again, I can go to my "Brush" and my "Minus brush," and I can just remove it from the areas where I want to keep a little bit of lightness and brightness. Now I'm also wanting to kill this table here. I'm thinking that possibly a graduated filter would work here. So too would the adjustment brush and we could even use a radial filter if we wanted to, but let's go and choose a graduated filter. I'm going to click "New" and this one I'm going to bring in from the bottom of the image. I'm probably going to angle it a little bit because I want the bike in my final image, but I don't want the table in it. Let's just say if with a little bit of work, we can get the filter to work, how we want it to work. But of course, we've always got the brush where we can add or subtract things from it. I'm going to make sure that I subtract the bike. I'm going to make sure that I've got a full value adjustment here on this table. We really just don't want this table to be showing at all. If I think it's not working a 100 percent, I can go back and choose something like the "Adjustment Brush" and let's just crank up the size of this brush. I've got a low flow on it, a pretty good size feather, and a pretty good decrease in exposure. I can also brush over this a little bit to remove its impact from the image as well. But you know, we probably don't have to do a whole lot of work in terms of darkening the image from this point on, because once we start adding lights, our eyes are going to go to the lighter areas of the image and so that's going to be where we're going to focus. For the lights, we're going to use an Adjustment Brush and let's click here on a "New Adjustment Brush." Then I click the hamburger and choose "Reset Local Correction Settings." We've zeroed back to nothing. I'm going to add some yellow and some exposure, because I want to start lighting my lights. Now I'm going to click the Zoom tool just by "pressing Z" and just zooming into this area because this is the light that I want to start lighting. Let's go to "Tool, " it's way, way too big, so I'm using my square brackets to adjust its size. I've got a decrease in exposure when I wanted an increase. Let's just go and start lighting this light. I'm looking at all the areas where this light should be giving out some light, and I'm just adjusting my flow as I go for each brush stroke just to make sure that I'm getting a good effect here. I think I can take my flow up even higher here, and perhaps a little bit of increased exposure. Now let's drop the flow down a bit. I'm going to pick up these areas of the building that's probably way too much. So I just "Control + Alt + Z" to remove that and let's just add a little bit more around here, because this light is going to be throwing some light over the buildings. We're going to see that around the light. Now having done that brush stroke, I can go to "New" and I can go and add a second one. I'm going to do that here, and I'm going to light this light a bit more. These also going to impact out here. Now that I've done that, I can go back and click on "New," and I can add a third light in here. I'm going to do that where the bulb is. Now that I've done that, let's just zoom back out and see what it looks like. You'll want to be moving between a long view and a close up view of this image as you work, just simply so that you can make sure that things are working the way you want them to work. That's basically what you're going to do with light. You going to light inside the light fairly intensely, and then you're going to throw some light to the areas around the back of the light where light would fall if this were in actual fact a lit lamp. Now there's an area under here that's going to be dark if this were a lit lamps. I'm going to go to the "Adjustment Brush." I'm going to reset all my settings here, drop down my exposure a little bit, and I'm just going to paint in a little bit of shadow under here, which is the shadow that we would get if the light was lighting here, it would be casting a shadow because this is a window ledge here. There are some other areas that we can use in this image. I'm going to just zoom in over here, because there's another lamp we can use and there's also some windows. Let's go to the lamp and do the same thing here. We've got increased exposure, and we want some yellow light, a small brush. Let's just check our flow, it's pretty low, so let's crank that up a little bit and we're just going to light this light. Then we're going to look at what the light might be casting a little bit of a glow on, and there's some laundry hanging out the window here and that's going to capture the light spilling out from this light and so to around the back of the light, there'll be a little bit of light picked up. Once we've done that, let's go to New, and let's add another one. Again, we want to work at some intensity inside this globe itself. I'll click in here to add another spot and if I need to erase it, I would just go to the erase tool and just erase around it. I'm not going to worry too much about that, I just really want you to get the feeling for what we're doing here, and I'm going to click New. Now down here, what I want to do is to suggest that there's light in the windows behind here, so we want to increase the exposure, we want it to be a sort of yellow. We want it to be probably low flow, fairly high feather here. Let's see how we go with this. I'm just going to pin it down and then just add in these sorts of window glows if you like, and if you want to make it a little more intense in certain areas, you can just increase your flow, and for example, we might get a little bit of light spilling out on the window ledges here as well so we can paint that in. There might be lights in these windows too, so you can just think about what light there might be and then you can add that light to the image. Let's go to the long view of the image, and let us choose another tool so we don't see all of these little pins. There's some promise in here in terms of our lighting, but let's have a look here too. There's another light here that we can light, but there's also a suggestion that behind this wall is something else happening. You can see the signs being cut off, so what if there were a bar or a café around there? It would be throwing light into the back of these motorbikes. Let's go, and do that. Again, I'm going for this sort of increased exposure, fairly soft brush here, nice feather on it. Let's just increase the size, and let's just pin it down and throw a bit of light in this area here. I'm going to want to erase it if I get over the edge of the building because the light's not going to jump around corners. I'm going back to Add. I'm just going to cast a little bit of yellow light in here and perhaps a little bit of yellow light reflecting on the wall here, and once I've done that. I can go to New, and I can add a little bit more light, so maybe change the intensity or the flow or maybe just set down another brush and just add little bit of life in the areas where I want that extra little bit of light, so let's just go to this lamp here, and we can light it as well. Put a pin down for it, add a bit of light and a bit of light behind where it would be. Go to New, crank up the flow a little bit. I need to get a pin in there, so I can do something with it, and add a bit more light here. Of course, you can throw a third light at it if you need to. You just need to make sure that you can get your pins down there. It can get a bit crowded when you're working with these pins, so let's go back to the long view of the image. Again, keeping an eye on what's happening here, so that we can make sure that everything's looking as we want it to look. I'm thinking that I would like to add a little bit more color around here. I'm going to just crank up my brush, and maybe just lighten these areas a little bit. Add a bit of lightning to them, maybe even to the front of this building. Now I can also add a bit of light to the vehicles here, because they would be picking up perhaps a little bit of the street light here or the building light here. I'm just adding a little bit of yellow light to the motorbike. Pretty much in the areas where the motorbike was reflecting in the first place, but just making sure that this time it's picking up a sort of yellow light if you like, and there's a vehicle here that has a window that might be picking up some light as well, so I can just add a little bit of detail there. Now at this point you might be saying, okay, so I've got my image, but it's sort of not quite light enough. Well, we can always throw a radial filter over the whole thing. We can grab the radial filter, and just pop a radial filter in here. Let's turn it so that it's adjusting on the inside, not the outside. Let's dial down the increase of exposure. We actually are increasing exposure, but not probably as much as was in the thing in the first place. Because this is the lit area of the image, we can increase contrast, because even though it's after dark and we might see softening after dark, we've also got this light. We can say, well, in those lit areas, we would actually see a little bit of an additional contrast, and we can also throw a bit of clarity and saturation in at this stage if that's what you want. It's really depends on what you're looking for in your image, but a radial filter could help you with creating a little bit of interest in the image. You can also go to the tone curve, and at this point you may want to change from a linear to a medium or a high contrast tone curve to a strong contrast tone curve. I'm thinking medium probably, but this is darkened the image quite considerably. That's the linear, and that's a medium. If I choose to go medium contrast, I may want to come back to the basic panel and just dial back the exposure. Before I had decreased exposure quite a bit, but I was getting a bit of darkness added with this medium contrast curve, so I can go back and say, well, okay, because I got a bit of darkness from the contrast curve then maybe I don't need so much darkness for my exposure setting, and here too, I can add in some vibrance. Vibrance and saturation are going to give a lot of warmth to this area of the image where we're actually seeing this sort of nice light effect. Now, looking here, and I should really soften this area here, this has been a very quick approach to something that you probably might want to spend three-quarters of an hour on an image like this to just work on it. I also need to darken here. It's not perfect, but you've got the idea of the kind of tools that you can use and the sort of thought process that you can go through when you're doing images like this, when you're converting day into night. Look for light sources, they are going to be the first thing that you're going to be able to use; any lamp, you can light. But you can also say to yourself, where else is light going to come from at night? Well, it's going to come from windows because people are living in these houses, and down here, probably the reason why I chose this image for a day for night, is because it's got this little bend in the road here, and something's happening around that corner; let's go, and imagine what might be happening around the corner, and then let's light the scene to reflect what it is that we're seeing there. Now I've given you this image so that you can follow along. You'll find a link to it in the class project area. You can download and play with that image yourself as well. 3. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Lightroom Day to Night: This is the image that we're going to work on in Lightroom. The first thing I'm going to do is to crop it because I think there's way too much image here, and not particularly interesting image at that. I'm going to bring in the sides here and crop down from the top a little bit. I'm also noticing that the top of the stairwell is not straight, so I'm going to straight into pretty much the top stair in the stairwell. Now, we have an image that's a little bit more square, if you like than portrait, and we've got the most interesting part of the image visible. To make this more of a night time image, we're going to need to drop the exposure. I'm going to drop the exposure here, and I'm also going to add some blue into it by just adjusting the temperature. I'm also going to remove a little bit of contrast. Now, the problem with removing contrast is that also lightens the image up a little bit, so I may have to compensate with a little bit extra exposure reduction. Now I'm a little concerned that the greenery and the bottom of the stairs is still a little bit light. To solve that, I'm going to use a graduated filter. I'll click on the Graduated filter. I'm going to double-click on Effect just to zero it out. The settings are zeroed out. Now if you're doing this in Adobe Camera Roll, you would need to create some setting here because you can't just put down a graduate filled without something. What you'll do is probably just reduce the exposure. I'm going to hold shift as I drag in my Graduated Filter, and I'm going to make it a fairly wide transition from being applied at full strength to being transitioned to no strength at all. Now if I want to add some pieces to this filter effect in later versions of Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Roll, you can click on brush and then you can use your A or your B brush to add areas to this filter. For example, where this filter is going from a 100 percent through to nothing, I could add those bits in at a full 100 percent. Well, I need to just up my flow a little bit on this brush to make sure that that's happening. I can add areas to this graduated filter so I could start working, for example, on the stairs here and just make sure that they were added into dark in them a little bit. I'll click Done, and then I could add another graduated filter here in from the bottom to adjust the stairs are little bit more. Again, I can use the brush on that so I can borrow those settings to actually work a little bit more on the greenery. These brushes allow us to take a graduated filter or a radial filter and then extend the effect of it to other areas of the image. It's really handy way of working. You can add areas to the filter or you can erase them. I'm just going to click here on the mask overlay, and you can see the areas that I've now added to this filter effects. It's gone from being just a horizontal filter to one that's affecting a big and irregular area of the image. Now my overlay is green, yours is going to be pink. I just recolored mine. I'll click Done. For now we've got our darker areas of the image. Now we need to turn our attention to lighting this courtyard, and probably the first tool to start off with here is going to be the Adjustment Brush. For this you want to increase exposure and also increase the temperature. You're going to take that into the yellow area. I've got a reasonable flow here, so I'm going to back it off a little bit, pin this down and just start brushing this on. Now, this adjustment is not set in concrete. If it is too intense, I can always just back it off by adjusting the exposure back. The exposure setting is going to be for the entire Adjustment Brush so it's able to be adjusted at any time. Now there's some pink flowers here that are rather interesting that I want to include in this effect, and also I want to start getting a little bit of this doorway because there's some interesting grill on this doorway that I'd like to bring in in a minute. Once I'm finished with that brush effect, I'm just going to click Done. I'm going to zoom in here so that we can see things a little bit more clearly. I'm going back to the adjustment brush, I'm going to do another one. This time I'm going to shrink the size of the brush, and here I want to light these windows in here. I'm just going to paint over them with my adjustment brush to add some light, to what I'm imagining is a window that has a light behind it. Now, if you go to phi, you can hold the Alt or Option key down and the brush just flips from a paint on brush to a paint off brush. It's exactly the same as selecting the eraser. If you need to move your image around, just hold down the space-bar and that turns the pointer into a hand so you can move the image around, and also want to light this little window in here a little bit, but that was probably a bit of an over-light effect. Now if you want to vary your brush as you paint, you can just adjust the flow and adjust the feather as you work on this. Now I'm thinking with this, it's not quite yellow enough, so I'm going to add some yellow color by going through the color picker here, and I'm just going to add a little bit of yellow to this. Click Done, and let's just zoom back out to say how the lighting effect is going. At any time you can come back to the adjustment brush and just pick up one of these pins and adjust the setting for that pin. Again, it's not set in concrete. You can still adjust it if you need to. But I'm headed into this grill area in here, because I just want to start picking up a little bit of detail on the grill. I'm again going to go through the adjustment brush. I'm going to make it pretty big this time. We're just going to brush over this area to lighten it up a little bit so I can start seeing the grill. Now, I'm not worried that I'm over lightening the area. What I want to do now is perhaps back off the shadows a little bit and increase the highlights or maybe increase the contrast. I get a little bit of this contrast, the effect here, to just bring up a little bit of detail in that grill. Maybe a bit of clarity might help as well. Clarity is going to really boast that. If I go up with clarity, then I'm going to back off my highlights and back off my exposure a bit because that's going to give me just perhaps that little bit of detail that I want. Certainly going to take back my shadow is a little bit. You can see now that we've got that grill lit up a little bit, I think it's lit up too much. I'm going to just select that adjustment here. What I can do if the whole adjustment is too much, rather than fiddling with a sliders, if I can just click this down pointing arrow, and that turns this into an amount slider, so I can take that whole effect off or I can add it back in again. I'm just going to wind it up a little bit, but not a lot. I can click here to go back to the regular Adjustment Brush settings. You have an ability to take an adjustment and actually vary the entire adjustments strength. At this point I think I'm going to the Radial filter, so I'm just going to click on the Radial filter, drag out a circle that's pretty much going to fit inside this arch. Now, you can say, as I can say, that this is going the wrong way around. It's affecting the outside and not the inside. Well, all we have to do is to invert this mask and now it's affecting the inside and the outside. Of course it's way too intense, so it's going to bring down the exposure here. But I may want to increase the clarity in here. If I do, I'm going to adjust the exposure to compensate, and maybe even the saturation. Let's see if we can get a little bit of color into this courtyard here. I'll click Done. Now there was a light here. I'm just going to zoom in here. It's really hard to say, but let's just go and hit it with a bit of exposure and see if we can pick up where the light actually is. This is the middle of the light fitting, and I'm just going to really crank up exposure here so that we can see what it's looking like. This is the side of the light fitting, and then as a bit underneath as well. Now, if this really were a lit light, it would be casting a bit of light around and behind it. I'm going to turn the flow down. I'm going to increase the size. I'm just going to start painting in a little bit of a hint of this light, throwing some light onto the brick wall behind. Now I'll click done and I'm going to go back and hit this light with yet another one of these adjustments. Again, a smaller setting here. You might need to click a little way from the previous adjustments so you don't select it by mistake. Then just painting this little bit of extra light into the light itself. At this point, I want to see how it looks relative to the rest of the image. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. Well, I've obviously got to do something about the top of this or just crop the top off, and so for me right now I'm just going to crop the top off. But you may want to experiment with moving your light a little bit higher up just to actually add a little bit of light in here. But I'm just going to move through this fairly quickly for you. At this point, you could go ahead and add additional light. You can add a little bit of extra color. You would probably spend about 20 minutes, half an hour on this. You could easily do that to get the effect that you want. But let's have a look at some finishing touches that you could apply as well. One of them is to go back to these Presence settings here and increase the clarity on the image and the vibrance, and that will add a little bit of color, a little bit of richness to the image. So two will atone curve adjustment. Let's go the Tone Curve here, and let's hit it with a medium or a strong contrast. You can choose which of these you like better. Both of them are going to darken the image a little bit. If you choose medium or strong contrast, then probably you want to come back to the Basic panel and just back off the Exposure adjustment, because you'll have lost a little bit of the lightness in the image by doing that adjustment. Now one of the other things that I would be looking at here is that this light is probably going to pull down here a little bit. I'm probably going to go to the Radial filter because it's going to be the easiest thing to use here. I'm just going to position at roughly where I think this light is going to fall on these stairs. I'm going to invert my mask, and probably just back off the life a little bit there and click Done. There's an idea as to the things that you can look for when you're turning day to night. When you're choosing an image, look for an image that has potential light sources. Here we actually had a light. We've got some windows that we can light. We've also got something going on behind this arch, and we can imagine what's going on behind this arch. Maybe there's a multi-story building, maybe this is a little courtyard in an Italian building, and so light is been thrown down there by a overhead light in the courtyard, or just the rooms that are around the courtyard that are lit at night because there are people in the building. Look for anything that you can use as a potential or a suggested light source, and then use the tools that you have in light from for adding the light to your image. Of course, you'll be using exposure and temperature to add darkness where things would be naturally dark at night. 4. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Final thoughts, project and wrap up: Before we finish up this class, can I suggest that if you are working in Adobe Camera Raw, that you have a quick look at the Lightroom class just to see how we relate that image and what we found in that image, and how we edit it. If you're a Lightroom person, then go and look at the Adobe Camera Raw class, not because you necessarily want to learn the tools and Adobe Camera Raw, but because of the special lighting techniques that were used in that particular image. You'll find a download link in the class project area so that you can download both of these images. They're both JPEG images. In Lightroom you need to import that into Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. The Adobe Camera Raw video tells you how you can open that image in Adobe Camera Raw to work on it. Your project for this class will be to either relight one of your own images or relight one of the images that I've given you to work with. Have a look at the image and determine where you can find light sources potentially in the image, and then make it look as if it's been shot well after the dark. Post a picture of your finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about the potential of relighting images and turning day into night. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which led to recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you are enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this too is a class that they may enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for lunch. I'll look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode of Adobe Camera Raw in Lightroom for lunch soon.