Tweaking Night Shots

[RainPacket]

I (sort-of) covered this in a dead thread I resurrected, but I realized I should perhaps cover it here.

Here's an example of before...


...and after.


The 'before' is more or less how the shot came out of camera. I changed the white balance by setting the paving-stones as neutral gray. That gave me the color range I was looking for, for the most part, including a lovely deep blue gradient in the sky I hadn't even hoped for but was pleased to discover.

I then ran the image through Nik Sharpener Pro's 'RAW Pre-Sharpener' phase to bring out some of the details. I tweaked it to especially concentrate on the bush behind the car, and the windows of the buildings across False Creek.

To finish up, I used Nik Viveza to bring the hue of the bush a bit more vibrant. (Very subtle, but adds to the contrast there.)

All of this was done in Apple Aperture, out of the original RAW file.

I highly recommend the Nik Software tools, for what that's worth; they have a 'control points' system where you can put down specific control points, adjust how powerful those points are and how far their influence extends, and change the parameters just on a given control point. This is useful in the noise-reduction (Dfine) and sharpening (Sharpener Pro) tools, but really just blows everything else out of the water when working with Viveza for color control.

[RainPacket]

And as a second example, we have our before...


...and after.


In this case, we are going seriously old-school with this shot; the original is from two years ago and taken with my old Rebel XTi. The original is, again, pretty much straight out of the camera.

Once again I tweaked the white balance, this time choosing one of the railings of the dock as neutral gray. The result was not as pleasing as the previous shot (unsurprising, since the XTi's dynamic range isn't as good as the 40D's), so I needed a bit more tweaking.

First I ran it through Sharpener Pro again, to clarify details on the houseboats; the default settings proved reasonable here, so I didn't bother with control points, and just hit 'go.'

Rather than trying to use Viveza for the rest of the color oddity, I then whacked the exposure slider up a few notches and turned the vibrance slider up. Vibrance, for those who don't use Aperture or Lightroom, is like saturation but ignores colors that are already highly saturated. The usual reason people use vibrance is because you get less weirdness with most skin tones, but I find I like vibrance because I get less strange-painting-like chromatic weirdness overall than I would with saturation. In this case, the (uninteresting) sky turned a much nicer color while the houseboats and water, already rich in color, didn't lose their hues.

My friend Terence tries, as a rule of thumb with night shots, to aim for a white balance of 2200K when setting a manual white balance. I tend to just play around until I find something I like. The general rule I try to aim for now is to get that cool, twilight blue in the sky (if you can get a gradient, even better!) and get even the tungsten light-sources to be white, then muck about with individual areas until the picture seems more vibrant.

[Gronygroovy]

Thank you lots! Bookmarked!

[dannyrich]

Great work, are these all done RAW?

[RainPacket]

Originally Posted by dannyrich

Great work, are these all done RAW?

Yes, these were tweaked from the original RAW.

If you are doing white balance work, you nearly always want to be doing so from RAW if possible, I should have mentioned. Trying to fix white balance in post on a JPG is an effort in futility and frustration; there's just not enough data left to reclaim the hues.

[SusieMet]

I personally like both versions. But great job on the tweaked ones.

[McMum]

i also like both versions. I am a fan of Nik software, I also like Imagenomic for noise reduction.

[soepaidjo]

how to fix white balance in PS, i hardly find one

[RainPacket]

Originally Posted by soepaidjo

how to fix white balance in PS, i hardly find one

Correcting white balance is easier in Aperture or Lightroom; you can simply go to the White Balance setting, click on the eyedropper tool, and then click on something in the image that is neutral grey. Adobe Camera RAW (the window that opens when you first try to import a RAW file into Photoshop) does have a white balance tool over in the panel on the right, which also can be used in the eyedropper-on-grey manner.

If you're just doing Photoshop directly on a JPG, however, you'll need to play with the color levels in Image -> Adjust. Photoshop doesn't have a 'white balance' slider or tool, per se, but you can fake it like this.

I hope that helps!

[Farscape]

Wow, what a difference between the before and after shots. Going to try this with the street light out front the house tonight, which throws out a very similar light color as the first picture.

Thanks for the tip, RainPacket