Finishing the high-ISO night photo

- [Chris] Hi, my name is Chris Orwig, and welcome to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Lightroom Classic CC, and here we're going to take a look at how we can finish off the look in a high ISO night photograph. And this is the photograph after it has been finished, and you can see the overall color and the look that we have here. Then this is the photograph as it appeared right out of the camera. Now, as I mentioned, this one's pretty high ISO. It was an ISO capture of 10,000.

I was capturing this image from a boat. So it's not going to be tack sharp, but we're going to try to make the most with what we have. What I'm going to do here inside of the Basic panel is start off by modifying my overall color temperature. I'm interested in cooling off that color temperature so we have some cooler tones. Next step is going to be to boost the exposure just a touch here to try to open things up a little bit. Add some contrast as well. That will start to bring out our colors. I'm bringing that up to somewhere in the 60s. Drop down my highlights.

That will help the glow just to be brought back a little bit there. Boost those shadows. And then I want to bring out even more color, so I'm going to bring up some of the vibrance here. Now, at this point if we zoom in on this image, we're going to see that it's kind of falling apart, right. There's all of this color noise. Look at the sky up here. It's not doing so well. But we can fix that by going to our Detail panel. In the Detail panel, we need to turn on noise reduction for luminance and for color, and that really just saves the day.

So we need to try to add some noise reduction. Sharpening-wise, let's increase our sharpening value but keep that detail amount pretty low, because there's so much texture on this image. There's so much digital grain or digital noise, so to speak, that we have to be careful not to kind of exaggerate that or bring that out. So we want to find just the right amount there with that. Okay, well, already the photograph is looking a ton better, right. We have these vibrant colors. And I'm kind of trying to create this really fun, beautiful color palette, because I love the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and I want it to almost glow and stand out in a wonderful way.

Well, next, let's choose our radial adjustment tool. Here we'll go to the Effect pull-down menu, and I'm going to choose Temp because I want to warm things up a little bit and add a little bit of exposure and contrast. Drop those highlights. And then click and drag over the image. What I'm looking to do here is just to bring in a little bit of light onto the bridge itself. And sometimes if you have one adjustment like this, you may want to reuse it. And a great way to reuse an adjustment is to right-click or Control-click, then choose Duplicate.

Now what you can do then is bring this one down here. And down below, well, then I need to modify it a little bit, but still you can see how we're kind of opening up some of the light in this area. What I'm going to do is cool off the color temperature a little bit. Add a touch more contrast. And just modify that a little bit there. This one, bring that maybe right around there, and then scroll down and look at the before and after so you can kind of see how these adjustments are bringing in some nice light into the image. As always, you want to be careful that you aren't overdoing it or creating any problems.

So here I'm just modifying this a little bit with my tonality and color and brightness. All right, there you have it, before and after with those final adjustments. Okay, well, there is a quick approach to looking at how we can improve a photograph that's captured at night with high ISO. And this revolved around working with our Detail controls, of course, right. We needed to improve those. We also needed to bring out some color and have some fun with color, so we changed that color temperature.

And we could obviously modify that too if that was a little bit too cool, but I think it's kind of fun to have those cooler tones in there. Makes for a pretty magnificent photograph. And then we modified some of our sliders and controls. And last but not least, we used the selective adjustment tool which allows us to make these radial adjustments in specific areas to modify those parts of the photograph. All right, well, with that, that is a wrap. And thanks for joining me in this week's episode.

I hope to see you in another one. Have a great day. Bye for now.