I recently watched Marie Antionette and I fell in love with the cinematography. The night scenes reminded me of the photography and cinema trick to turn day time scenes and turn them into night scenes. The reasoning for this is to avoid noise and grain. I am sure you have all experienced it before where you tried to take a night photo and it is a grainy mess. The way to get around this in a large scale production film without the film quality being horrid is to shoot the scene in the day time and then in post processing to lower the exposure and apply a blue filter to emulate night. I have done this a few times in my own works but my favorite example that I have documented was Old Main at Penn State University.
This was the original image I took that day. I was at Penn State for work and it started to spontaneously snow in April. For this technique to work the scene has to have very even lighting for example on an overcast day. Any harsh shadows will look unnatural and not work well.
Exposure was dropped about 5 stops. It is best to experiment depending on photograph as you do not want to lose too much data in the shadows. I could have stopped here but I have decided to go further to add in lights to give the image more layers.
Lights are created in 3 steps.
1st mask layer is the “light bulb”. This is a tiny spot at the lamp where the light bulb is and crank that exposure to max.
2nd mask layer is the “light bulb glow”. This is a large spot layer that goes around the light bulb. only increase that exposure by 2-5 stops depending to have a gentle glow effect.
3rd mask layer is the “ambient lighting”. I would put a little oval on the sidewalk, tree, or any other ambient objects and add a similar glow that is 1-3 stops brighter.
I have installed most of the lights and now the image has layers and feels more full rather. During this entire process I kept fiddling with the blue filter and exposure to see what felt the best.
The little black shields is to show all the little masks I added all over the place to give this photograph its lighting effects.
This is the final result, This took hours of adjusting to get it feels organic to me.
The final image sells the story that this is a night scene with none of the grain or noise.
A clean night scene at Penn State.