Feature: Turn Day Into Night
We can't always take pictures at exactly the right time. I have countless photos ("location" shots, for instance) that would have looked wonderful at a different time of day. But due to circumstances, I was forced to take them when it was convenient for me, the bus driver, or the local tour guide. Consider a picture of a lighthouse positioned a few miles off the coast of Cuba.
I would have loved to capture a picture at dusk, just as the sun was setting and the lighthouse was firing its spotlight. Two things kept me from realizing that goal. First, our boat was passing through around noon. Second, I was about twenty years too late. The lighthouse had long been abandoned and was unlikely to do anything that its resident ghosts weren't capable of handling.
I decided to create the picture I saw in my mind with Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Save the lighthouse picture to your hard drive so that you can follow along.
Swap Out the Sky
Our road to converting this daylight photo of a derelict lighthouse into a nighttime photo of a brightly lit beacon to maritime traffic begins as it does with many image editing projects: swapping out the bland, lifeless sky. A few clouds will add some character to the picture and give us the opportunity for some real contrast. Save my sky picture so that you can work with it.
Start by selecting the sky in the original lighthouse photo. Click the Magic Wand tool in Paint Shop Pro's tool palette. (It lives in the fifth cubby from the top with some other selection tools.) Look in the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen; if you don't see it, you can turn in on by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options. Make sure that the Magic Wand's tolerance is set to about 40 and the feather is zero. Then click in the sky; it should all be selected with just one or two clicks. If you don't get the entire sky in one click, hold down the Shift key and click again on the part of the sky that the Magic Wand missed the first time. Since we'll be converting to an evening sky, don't worry if small edge details get selected.
Open the substitute sky in Paint Shop Pro and immediately choose Edit, Copy from the menu. You can then close the file--we don't need it anymore--and make sure the lighthouse picture is selected again. Choose Edit, Paste, Paste Into Selection. You'll agree, I hope, that the new picture is an improvement.
Darken the Scene
Now it's time to turn this daylight scene into night. Choose Adjust, Brightness and Contrast, Curves from the menu. Click the curve and drag it down until the sky is a deep, rich, dark blue--the sort of color you see in the first hour or so after dusk. Remember that you're shooting for something artistic that satisfies your own eyes. My editors had trouble perfectly duplicating the specific colors in my image, but they got close enough to make themselves happy.
Since the sky is still selected, this change won't affect the lighthouse.
After you click OK, you'll see the change in your picture. If you think it's too light or dark, just open the Curve tool and try again. When you're happy with the sky, choose Selections, Invert from the menu to change the selection to the water and the lighthouse. Now open the Curves tool a second time and darken it again, but don't make it quite as dark as the sky. We're almost done.
Before you go on to the next step, get rid of the selection by choosing Selections, Select None.
Let There Be Light
Finally, it's time to add some light to the lighthouse using a bit of digital magic. Most image editors have some sort of illumination tool; in Paint Shop Pro, choose Effects, Illumination Effects, Sunburst. This tool lets you add a burst of light anywhere in the picture.
Start by dragging the sunburst directly over the top of the lighthouse (use the crosshair in the preview on the left of the dialog box). From here, it's all a matter of personal taste. To pick a color, click in the box next to Color. I set the color of the light to a pale yellow and dropped the brightness of the burst to 10. I gave the rays a low density (25) and dropped their brightness to just 5--making them very nearly invisible. Finally, I set the circle brightness to 40--this controls the intensity of the simulated lens flare.
And that's all there is to turning day into night.
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