Night Time Over Bozeman

I was going to do some portraits tonight...but that fell through so I decided just to go out and do a night shot of Bozeman. I've been trying to do more night photography lately, now that it's getting warmer and not -40.

I initially was going for a HDR panoramic, but in Lr I got the idea just to merge the brightest of the images into a panorama. The highlights form the cars and such would be overblown, but everything else would look pretty nice.

I got everything into a panorama in Ps, then brought it back into Lr.

note: I'm no longer to be as specific in everything I do in post, as I am beginning to do a lot and it's very complicated to explain it in a daily blob. I just don't have time. I'll happily answer questions if you comment though about any specific steps.

Once I had the image in Lr, I made a couple different versions of it. I made one greyscale, and three color versions. They were mostly done with presets that I tweaked a little bit. The goal here was to get some ideas about how I wanted the final image to turn out.

I then took the three color images into Ps and composited them. I used one as a luminosity blend mode layer, because that layer had the most contrast. In the luminosity blend mode, that layer will determine what areas of the layer below it are light and dark. Since the images were the same subject matter, all the luminosity blend mode did was apply the tonal range. I made a layer mask and removed some of the areas with too much contrast.

The other layer I put to a very low opacity and changed it to color. This transferred the colors in the image to the layer below. As you might have guessed, there was one of the color images that I really liked, but it wasn't quite there yet.

After compositing those images, I merged them all and duplicated that layer twice. I applied high pass filters to both and set both to overlay. One high pass filter was more than the other. These two filters made a hard light effect and also served to sharpen the image a bit.

I went back into Lr and applied two gradient masks raising contrast and clarity to the sky. I wanted a dramatic sky. I also applied a gradient mask and adjustment brush to the ground to brighten the shadows. Finally, I added some split toning just to try to get rid of that ugly orange color that comes with night shots in the city.

And here it is...

And of course Blogger is at it again...view the image on my Fb page please.

See you tomorrow!