How To Change Day Into Night In Photoshop

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to change day into night in Photoshop. We’ll use blend modes with solid color adjustments and color lookup adjustments to make our lighting effects and day to night transformation.

Change Day Into Night In Photoshop

I So we’re going to start off with this image. I got this image from Adobe Stock and I’ll leave the number of the Adobe Stock image in the description, and we’re going to use this other image of Night Sky.

How to Add a Night Sky Image

And the first thing I want to do is bring that night sky in. First, I want to duplicate my background layer, and I’ll just call this day image and I’ll up here to select Sky and Photoshop has made a selection of the Sky did a pretty good job here. And then I’ll come down here to the add new layer mask icon and click that and turn on my sky image and drag the sky image down below my day image. And on my layer mask for my day image, I’m going to invert the layer mask control or command + I.

And with that layer masks selected, I can use my move tool and I can move my sky around. And you can experiment with your sky just to see where it looks best. In my image here, I have a lot of color, so I want to reduce some of that color. I’m going to add a hue and saturation adjustment layer, and I’m going to bring my saturation down in my image and make it around 60.

I want to click on this icon right here, which is going to clip my hue and saturation adjustment layer to my day image. So now all my adjustments above here are going to just affect daytime image. It’s not going to affect the sky also. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to select some of these windows that we want the light to come out of, and you can use any selection tool you want to select the glass.

How to Select and Color areas of your Image

And here you have small glass panes. I’m going to use the polygonal lasso tool. But first I want to take care of this area right here. So I want to come up here to my polygonal lasso tool, and I could see that I missed an area right here with the sky. So I have my mask from my day image selected, and I’m going to use my polygonal lasso tool to get this area right here.

And I’m going to hit command + delete. And it’s going to feel that would black and command + D to de-select. Okay. So each of these windows here I’m going to select and use my polygonal lasso tool. And as I am going from point to point, you see the effect that the tool has. It gives you a rubber band effects that you can see kind of where you’re going.

And it helps in this regard here because you have all these little panes and up at the top you see I have this second square says add to selection, I have that selected. So now that allows me to keep on adding to the selection as I’m going. So I’m going to speed this up a lot. I’m just going to select all the windows where I want the light to come through.

If you make a mistake, you can hit escape and just start over. So I’m just pressing down on my spacebar and panning over to the areas that I want to select. I’m zoomed in. So now that we have a selection of the windows where we’re going to have the light coming through we’re going to color those windows. So to do that, we’re going to create a solid color adjustment.

And with the color picker, you can decide which color you want, something that looks like a light. I’ve already chosen a color. You can see that color value down here and I’m going to say, okay. I’m going to need my colorful layer. Window color. I’m going to move that up in my layer stack. And I want to make sure that it is also clipped to the layers below.

So you see the arrow right there. And you play with these blend modes right here. Whichever you like, if you like. In normal, I’m going to go to Linear Dodge, Add and make that my blending mode. And with that layer mask selected on my window color and ‘B’ for the brush, tool I have a light up here that I’m going to brush in some of this.

Something like that. And I’m using a soft round brush with an opacity of 100 and my flow of 33%. And for my windows up here, these edges here are pretty sharp when I add some feathering. So if I click on the info and bring up the properties on my layer mask and I can add some feathering to that, something about 2.7 and so that added some feathering to the window lights right here.

And so again, we’re going to make sure that any adjustment layers that we’re adding right now are clipped to the day image layer. Now we’re going to start on making our image a little bit darker. So you can use any image you want. It could be as light or as dark as you want to begin with, but we see how we can work with this image here that has a lot of bright light in it to begin with.

How to Add a NightTime Effect to Your Image

So now I selected my hue/saturation adjustment layer right on top of that. I want to add a color lookup. So we’re going to add a color lookup table and we’re going to choose, what do you know, moonlight. So we’re using this as a starting point. This is still a pretty bright image. Anyway, you can stop here if this is your taste, but I want to add a little bit more coolness.

First, I’m going to rename this Moon LUT. That’s so we chose yes for me. I want to make this a little bit darker, a little bit deeper. So this is going to depend on the image you choose. So now I’m going to come to my adjustment layers and I’m going to choose gradient map, I’m going to click right here in the middle to edit the gradient and slide down to where says Blues And I’m going to look for something called Blue 29, and I’m going to say, Okay, and close this. And on my gradient map, I’ll name this blue 29 and select my blending modes.

And come down here to soft light and choose that. So what’s good about using all these adjustment layers is at any point you can tweak it. I can take down my opacity, see that. And maybe I’ll change my passages to 90 for right now. And you can go back to any of these adjustment layers and change it to your liking.

And because I chose a bright image, I still see a lot of highlights and mid-tones that I might want to dim down a little bit. So next, what I could do is I could add a level’s adjustment layer and all these layers are clipped to my day image and my slider on the right here for some of my highlights.

I can bring that down a little bit. You can see how that dims that even more, some of the mid-tones here. I can bring that down a little bit. And again, this is to your taste. There’s before and after on that. So now I want to paint in some of the areas where this lamp is shining on this building here on its left and down here on the ground.

How to Add Colored Highlight to Your Image.

So on the Moon LUT layer that I have here and with my foreground color on black, I’m going to use my soft round brush and paint in on this lamp made that brush a little bit bigger paint here on the side of the building in any of the areas where I feel the lamp should be shining, something like that.

And if you make a mistake, add too much just hit ‘ X ‘ and your swatch will turn to white as your foreground color and you can paint over that and remove some of that. So now I want to add a little bit of color of the lamp. Whereas on the building and on the ground, so on select my levels adjustment, I’m going to add another solid color adjustment layer.

And I’m going to choose a lighter color in that window. I’m going to type in a color that I had chosen already. You can use that and say, Okay. So on my color fill layer up here, I’m going to change the blending mode to overlay. And I want to be able to paint in the areas of that light.

You can see that color is already showing through. If I hit command + I to invert that layer and hit ‘X’. And I’m going to paint with white as my foreground color. And I’m going to in to brush in the color that is coming from that lamp something like this. And I’ll paint the lamp a little bit. And I’m going to hit X because that is a little bit too much over there, a little bit too much there.

And this lamp is a little bit hard to see. So I’m going to put a layer mask on the sky layer over here. And with black as my foreground color, I’m just painting in a little highlight here at the top with the lamp, just so you can see more. You can click on any of these layer thumbnails.

You can change the color. You can change the color, of the window light you can change the opacity on any of your layers. Then come down here to the bottom of the layers panel on this eye. Hold ALT and click there’s the before, there’s the after.

See my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Read the previous blog article here ➡️ Premiere Pro Auto Reframe – Easily Create Vertical Video for Social Media