Photoshop: Half-Ass Your Way to Another Time of Day!

HEY! So - I'm by no means an expert in day to night photoshopping - but I thought this might be a nice chance to share an attempt at it with others.

Finding The Photo

So I was looking through some of my really old photos and I found some of my dogg, Raggs (shown right). He's a tiny little thing, and is about to celebrate his 18th. He's old, wise, and single. Athletic build, ladies.

OK so I grabbed one of my photos of him because I was looking for an outside photo for this experiment. I think the photo below does him alot of justice - since it's him in his natural, threatening form. I'm pretty sure this shot was taken minutes before he ambushed 12 cats (neighborhood record).

Anyways, lets start!

To begin, i removed any items I thought my distract from the scene. Those items are a basketball hoop, a bright red car, and a vicious man-beast.

Next, I desaturated the whole scene, and boosted the contrast while lowering the brightness.

Next, I airbrushed over the ground-areas that i wanted shadowed. I did it in a dark green and set the layer mode to "Hard Light".

So we have the ground area setup, now lets do some slight tweaking to items above the horizon line. I selected the top half and put it on its own layer. After that, I adjusted the shadow levels (shown below). Once done, I fade this layer into the background layer.

This part gets tricky, but I basically made a new layer, set it to multiply, and brushed in all the bright skylight coming through the trees. After that, I set this layer to 90% opacity so some light was available for adjusting later.

OK, highlights! I pulled out all areas that I wanted affected by some sort of light source - whether it be moon, street light, whatever. I duplicated certain areas, boosted the brightness and contrast, then blended them in. In some instances, I dodged the areas.

Moon! (no, keep your pants up) - the next step was attaching a blue sogtlight layer to simulate a moon glow.

Moon again! I started adding it in by setting a bright blue circle to screen mode. Around it, I airbrushed a blue glow and set it to overlay. From here, we will see details emerge (hopefully!).

OK, now take your brush tool and spot around the areas of tree light surrounding the moon. Set this layer to Overlay.

Now I'm going to go through and highlight some edge areas. I chose, the rooftop, fencing, truck, wires, and trees (see below).

Final Touches!

Check the overall light levels. I merged all layers to a new one (CTRL+ALT+SHFT+E). From here I adjusted the contrast, added some new dodge-lighting, and enhanced some other little details.

In the end, I was left with this!

That's it, hope you liked it!
It certainly could use more work, but it was fun to experiment with...

Until next time,


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PS Quickie: Meteor Invasion!
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