Photoshop Tutorials: Turn a daylight photo into a night shot

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This tutorial will show you how to take a low quality, lifeless and dull shot and turn it into a vivid night shot, with street lamp lightening.

Just look at the example below and see how can the most terrible, blurred, lifeless pixelated shot be turned into a professional photo with unique effects. I actually recommend that you’d take a really bad photo, perhaps old, scanned (not digital) so that you will be able to estimate the true value of this tutorial.

1. First take a picture of your choice. I used a very bad shot from my own collection, but you can pic any streetlight photo from Digital Free Photo stock.

2. Go to Filter >> Render >> Lightening effect , and apply the setting as shown below, when center of the spot of your light-point is placed exactly where your street lamp is.

You should have something like this (illustration nr. 3):

3. Duplicate the layer, and apply the very same settings as you did before once again. Remember tpl place the spot light in the middle of the streetlamp or any other source of light you have on your photo (such as car lights, candles, etc). if you won’t place the light correct, the effect will not look natural, and we do want to achieve a perfectly natural looking night shot.

4. After applying the spot light once again, your image will become much darker. Reduce the opacity of the upper layer a little, as shown on the screen shot below. After that, flatten the image.

5. Make sure your bother layers were flattened, and apply the light spot effect as before, only this time make the circle smaller (look at the illustration for exact parameters).

After applying the filter 3 times, and following all the steps below, you should have something like this. The main target is to darken the entire image except for the glowing area around the lamp (or candle, or whatever you use on your photo).

6. Now to a more artistic part of the photo manipulation. Since we want the picture to look more like a night shot, we have to remember that pictures taken at night usually have a dark green or dark blue hue. In this case, we want to go for a greenish hue, which is often seen in old town streets.

So, press Ctrl + L to go to Channels’ panel. Apply the settings below to get the desired colored effect.

That’s it.

Above you can see our result, but of course yours could look different and I hope better. Eventually it looks as if the sun is setting behind the tower, but this is not a bad effect either. I hope You enjoyed the tutorial!