Day for Night

[Steve Roberts]

Did you search the COW (this forum and the Cinematography forum) for “day for night”?

[Stephen Hellweg]

I did a search here but it returned every post with the word “for” in it.

I’ll try the other forum, but I was hoping to get some help with existing footage that was never intended to be used as day for night. I’m having OK luck with color correction and levels but it’s not great.

[Steve Roberts]

Did you place the text in quotes? I just did, and got a manageable number of posts.

[Stephen Hellweg]

Thanks, I found some, now if I could only get them to work.

my settings options (vers. 7) don’t seem to match those described.

[David Young]

Did you try this one:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=1

[Stephen Hellweg]

That’s the ticket!
Thanks so much.

[Darby Edelen]

[Stephen Hellweg] “Hello,
Any tips on taking video shot in the daytime and making it look like night time? Or at least a close approximation thereof.
“

Certainly. The important thing to remember when going from day to night is that human vision is less capable of discerning color in darkness. Other than that you may want to lean toward a blue tint to your footage (which stereotypically represents ‘night’).

When making your day for night look you will want to first darken and desaturate the whole frame of your footage. I generally avoid levels for this, I use a dark blue solid set to ‘multiply’ to darken and a black solid set to ‘color’ to eliminate saturation… decrease the opacity of the black solid to increase the saturation as you don’t want to totally desaturate the footage.

Next you’ll want to darken specific parts of your footage more than others. The sky may need more darkening, as well as areas that shouldn’t be receiving as much light. You can use a Generate > Ramp effect on a layer set to the ‘multiply’ blend mode for this, or you can simply mask a solid set to the ‘multiply’ blend mode. Play with the colors and opacities to achieve the look you want.

The last step is to add color and brightness back into the composition in order to preserve the light sources in the night scene. One way to do this is to create matte for the brightest parts of the image (which are, hopefully, light sources) and use this matte to holdout the original footage some. Alternatively, you can hand paint your own matte, which may be necessary in cases where the light source is not brighter than some of the surroundings or is too small to be noticed in day time… such as interior building lights (where as you can see lights in buildings over a mile away very clearly at night).

Here’s a sample of some day for night work I did, this one was relatively simple because the only light source was the sun, so I tried to make the sunlight look like moonlight.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Stephen Hellweg]

Thanks for all the info. I’m starting to make some headway.

[David Bogie]

DfN starts in the pre-production. You’ve got to shoot it for processing. for instance, you can’t have people in the background wearing sunglasses or your principals squinting in their closeups. You need headlights on cars. Watch for deep shadows under baseball caps. You need to watch for reflections in glass, glasses, windshields.

DfN is either elegantly convincing or it’s a stupid affectation. Your audience can tell the difference.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Stephen Hellweg]

Definitely! I just spent an hour rotoscoping headlights onto a news van.