Enhancing night cityscape

- [Instructor] Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we're gonna talk about how we can enhance a night cityscape, and we'll be working in Lightroom Classic CC. You know, this last week, I was in New York City. And I was visiting my brother-in-law, and he has the most amazing view from his patio. So of course, I set up my camera, and I captured this image. And I love the colors and the look of the photograph, but let me show you the original file.

It looked like this, a little bit lackluster, a little bit dull. I wanted more color. I wanted more life. I wanted something more like this. Well, let's talk about how we can go from before to after, and let's do that here in Lightroom. And it really isn't that complicated. It's just a matter of working with our Basic controls and the Tone Curve. Now, with our Basic controls, what we're gonna do is just start to modify things like our Exposure. So I wanna brighten things up. I also want a lot more Contrast, so I'm boosting these up. Now, when you make these initial adjustments, keep in mind they're not gonna look great, right.

The image is too bright. The lights became too bright and soft. But I'm gonna recover some of that, so I'm gonna go ahead and bring my Highlights down, boost those Shadows up, and then deepen those Blacks. And so it's a combo of all those settings, right, that starts to make this one work. Now, we wanna add some Clarity because with longer exposures, they become a little bit soft. So I wanna have some strong Clarity, and Dehaze is really gonna help out. Now, what Dehaze will do for us is it's gonna start to give us a lot of the snap that we need to the image.

The only trouble is it's now kind of this teal color because Dehaze does kinda funky things with color. But I'm gonna fix that, and I'm gonna do that by modifying this slider here. So I'm gonna go ahead and just modify this and try to find a nice amount for my color Temperature so that I have all of those blues. So I kind of took the color, what it was, and shifted it. And I did that just for expressiveness, right. This isn't how it actually appeared, but this is more my vision of how I wanted it to appear. All right, well, after having done all of that, what I like to do is I like to go to the Tone Curve and just add a little bit more contrast to this as well.

And I find that adding that S curve, like I do in Photoshop, brings an image to a place where I like it. This is more just my style. I like having that little extra sort of snap of color and of contrast. And there you have it, our process of taking our nighttime cityscape photographs and really bringing out the color and the contrast in those images. If you haven't ever tried this, get out there and capture an image like this, and then experiment with these settings. Again, it's all about working with your Basic controls, a little bit with your color Temperature, and then doing some Tone Curve work to finish it off.

All right, well, that wraps it up for this week's episode. Have a fantastic rest of your day. I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.