Day for Night

I often see images whose mood is influenced by the imposition of unusual outdoor lighting conditions. I have admired those images that suspend the viewer between day and night, that play with our expectation of what sunlight or moonlight should do. This is the first of my responses to images like that.

This was originally a standard vacation photo shot at Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay.

The first step was to add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer. The brightness went all the way down and the contrast all the way up. A hue/saturation layer was added next. While it might appear that all colors were desaturated equally, I paid attention to the trees the rocks, the sky and the water, adjusting each until it had the feeling of night.

Next, I dodged and burned using the non-destructive method of adding a gray layer in overlay mode and painting on it with black and white at about 50% opacity. This brought out the texture in the far trees. I played down the brightness of the near rocks and made sure the island stood out. To give the image some extra pop I created a new image layer and used apply image to create one layer with all the adjustments merged. Over that I added a curves adjustment layer and used apply image to create a mask. The light area of the images became the light areas of the mask and when I adjusted the curve, only the highlight areas were affected.

Finally I created a duplicate layer, treated it with a high pass filter, and set the layer mode to overlay. Hitting that layer with a surface blur filter gave a little mystery to the image.

I have debated over whether the image is too dark. I seem to want to see what's going on a little better. However, the feeling I get is one I've had in dreams where I am in a dark room and I want to turn on the light, but it's broken. There is something urgent about needing to see, and I think this picture, so typical on the one hand in it's straightforward pictorial statement, on the other is a perfect vehicle for the dream-inspired conflict I feel while straining to see, to accustom my vision to my surroundings.