Lighting Effects! Specific Applications Help.

[LED Concepts]

Hi Guys - Lighting Nerd here.

Just the gist - I do landscape lighting. Being able to show the customer their home with the desired effect at night is a great selling feature.

I had this photo done in about 20 minutes for me by another landscape lighting company - they said they used photoshop and gave me no other information. Ive been working to create this exact photo for some time now utilzing PS lighting effects and masks with no success.

Does anyone have experience or could help with the creation of lighting effects? Maybe a plug in, or sosmething im missing within PS? Here are the two photos. One original, and one im trying to reproduce.

[Myra Ferguson]

Here's a tutorial from Photoshop Cafe that should help that with 3 main parts:

1. Create night color toning.
2. Set up Layer masking.
3. Paint in illumination.

I'd also add that now you can use Replace Sky to swap out the day sky for a starry night.

And if there are noticeable contrasty shadows on the siding, those should be cloned out on the day version that you later expose when you paint on its layer mask.

[Mylenium]

It's pretty much an "everything and the kitchen sink" thing. From basic color correction tutorials to stuff like frequency separation to even out lighting/ different textures pretty much anything can be appropriate depending on the situation. the "American Night" tutorial, as we call it here in Germany, that @Myra Ferguson pointed you at is a good quick start, but in the long run you may want to learn a few other tricks. It may also be a good place to start by avoiding photographs with visible sun casting and shadows, i.e. snapping them at more suitable times. that's one thing that is still very visible in your colleagues' work and may need further refinement.

Mylenium