'Day for Night' is a filmmaker's term for shooting a film with a special filter so that, even though it's shot in the daylight, it looks like it was shot at night. I'm curious to know if anyone has attempted this technique with still photographs using photoshop. I can think of a number of ways to attempt it, but I thought it would be a good idea to ask the experts first.

post a picture of an example of "day for night" and I'll find a way to do it.

Seems to me the "day for night" was done by shooting B&W film through a red filter, to darken blue things (like sky), and the rest of the effect was just closing the camera lens a f-stop or two. You could simulate the same thing by darkening the blue channel of a RGB image and converting to grayscale and darkening overall, I guess.

platinum-- Thanks-- unfortunately I don't have video capture, and I'm not certain what films have used day for night, as opposed to the more expensive lighting techniques. Jim-- Thanks for the info and the suggestions. I'm not sure how I'd use the conversion to greyscale in the effect. I'll experiment with it a little and post my results here. What I ultimately want to do is to do is take the scene that's been converted to night, plant a campfire in the middle of it and create the proper lighting technique for the campfire. That's going to be very labor-intensive (if I can pull it off at all!) but an interesting challenge!

Attached Link: http://www.formatt.co.uk/default.asp?content=glass/frmset.asp

PS: Here's a website that sells glass filters for a day for night effect: http://www.formatt.co.uk/default.asp?content=glass/frmset.asp

Here's a trial run of my attempts to create a day for night effect. The image was first adjusted so that the contrast was about 20 percent higher and the brightness about 10 percent lower. The image was flattened so that there was only the base layer. Using the paint bucket tool, with the setting of 'multiply', I dumped a gallon of dark violet paint on the picture. (The 'multiply' effect doesn't seem to work properly when applied to a level, even when 'use all levels' is indicated.' To give the sky some graduation, I used the airbrush tool(set at 'multiply). The results of the airbrush weren't satisfactory to me, I need to figure out how to apply the brush properly from the edge of the canvas (suggestions welcome.) I used the airbrush to lay in a little bit of moonlight highlighting on the top of the ambulance.

I think you'll have to lighten the shadow under the ambulance. now it's even stronger than during the day. or just make the lines brighter. just a thought. .....(o;

Why not just lower the Lightness and Saturation (HSL Dialog) and use Variations to add more blue-violet to the image? Decreasing saturation is important, since the night vision cells in our eyes only see in shades of grey. The shadows should remain sharp, perhaps even sharper than daylight. This is because a bright blue sky will backfill some day-shadows, which doesn't occur at night with a full moon.

This one was done pretty much as i suggested, except I tried to balance the colors back out again. Of course the shadows are much too strong, but they were on real "day for night too" - plus any lights in the shot were always a giveaway, as they would be far too dim. Only works with a blue sky, incidently.

That's the one thing I neglected in my version. The sky should be darker with a glow on the horizon. Jim: I did notice that your image is much warmer than mine.

Yeah, mine probaly has the forground too warm and saturated. When I made the first post I was thinking in terms of starting with a color image and finishing with a grayscale, of course when you pull the blue channel down the picture goes tward yellow.

This is fun! Thanks for the suggestions and examples! Good point about that shadow! I think this thread should be 'repurposed' from 'creating a 'day for night' effect to 'how do you take a daytime picture and make it look like it's night?' With Photoshop, you've got a lot more possibilities than a movie camera has. In the image attached, I attempted to turn a day scene into nighttime, and I wanted to add a lamp. Here's how it was done: Took the original image and created two layers that were copies of it. In layer 1 (the 'beneath' layer) I increased the contrast and the brightness to create a glare effect. I also increased the yellowness slightly, all done with adjustments. In layer 2, I increased the contrast and decreased the brightness, to make a nighttime effect. I also adjusted the color shifting away from yellow towards blue, and away from red towards (whatever the color on left side is). The background was still too light, so I worked with the airbrush and a dark blue, with the airbrush set on 'multiply', to darken up the background considerably. The light bulb was created on layer 3 by making a round selection and using the paintbucket to dump solid white into it. The 'hood' of the bulb was created on layer 4 using the same round selection, expanded 5 pixels, with a greyish dark blue color applied with the paintbucket. I sliced this in half using the eraser (with a hard-edged setting), and erased the lower half of it. I used the burn and dodge tools to darken and lighten the hood to give it a 3-d appearance. On layer 2, I used the eraser (with a soft-edge setting) to erase away the places where the light was falling. This allowed layer 1, with the 'glare' effect, to show through, creating the illusion that incandescent light was falling on that section of brick. Pshop is so COOL!