How would you go from that picture to this one?

[Daniel Roy]

Hello team,

how would you go from the first picture towards the second one (more foggy, lighting effect) --- how would you please approach the problem? Which tools would you use? 

best

Dan

First (mine --- pls ignore unfinished sky)

Second (Heiner Schilling)

[D Fosse]

White balance and exposure.

The Schilling photo is actually quite overexposed for my taste, but the white balance is good.

Yours is underexposed, but mainly the white balance is way off. You need to fix this in the original raw files. If the street in front is lit by the standard sodium vapor lights, that may not always look so good, because that is almost monochromatic light with a very narrow spectral spike. You'll just have to try.

Edit - one more thing: Personally, I really hate it when windows are completely blown out like in both these photos. It's much cooler when you can see what's inside. But that's just me.

[Bojan Živković]

For creating a fog effect, you can search for a tutorial. This effect can be painted on a separate layer and then adjusted as needed.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Make the layer a Smart Object before you start editing it, so you can go back in a keep changing it.  I can see I went a bit strong with the Whites for instance.

[Daniel Roy]

Thank you all.

@D Fosse I particularly did appreciate the reference to the narrow spectral range of vapor sodium lights, I will try reading about this. Is this related to why pictures of Japan at night always appear so rich? something in the nature of the chosen 

I did recover a lot of colour range playing with Camera raw but at cost of iso-like noise.

Truly surprised I only now start diving into Camera Raw. Am I silly or everything Camera Raw does can be done with curves, brightness etc, all the adjustments layers? But reformated in an easier to proceed with format?

Best and thanks

Dan

[davescm]

This was a combination of :

a. Camera raw filter to reduce the orange cast

b. Star Filter Pro 4, to get the glow around the highlights

c. Some white paint in overlay blend mode to lighten certain sections

d. A curve with a mask

e. Some red painting (again with the layer in overlay blend mode, to bring some warmth to certain areas of the background

Dave