Nightlife Lights Layout

After putting up my night life themed park header, many of you asked how to mimic the effect. The following tutorial will be done in Photoshop CS3 and can be followed in all other Photoshop programs focusing on lighting and textures to bring a vibrant mood to an image. Credit to Bootleg from flikr.com for the stunning California Adventure park images.

1. To begin, pick out any scenery images you like that were taken at night because lighting against a dark canvas will make the colors stand out. To save on confusion, throughout the tutorial I will assume that you’re using my two identical pictures and a black background.

Picture #1, Picture #2

2. My main focus will be the bigger Ferris wheel picture and I’m placing it first on the right of my black background with the smaller image on the left. After getting out the layer palette, (press F7) the left picture is then set to lighten mode at 100% opacity and the top part of it is erased with a round brush to blend it in without anything being done to the sides.

3. To intensify the effect for the future, I’m going to add a slight blurry glow to the Ferris wheel by right clicking and duplicating the background image, dragging it to the top and setting it to screen 11%.

Then the blur comes from going to filter > blur> gaussian blur on the upper bar and setting the radius to 0.2 like this.

4. So right now we have a blend with a lightened and blurred wheel, nice, but the colors are all over the place so we need to make a base and start to tame them by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color. You can pick whatever colors you want to tone down enhance on your own but I would suggest first editing the Neutrals and then seeing what else you can do. I’m going for a purple and blue feel so I’ll adjust the appropriate channels to begin to unify the two pictures.

5. My current result has a lot more pink and purple but the blue is lacking, so now for a more dramatic adjustment I’m going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Channel Mixer to once again adjust the coloring except this time to concentrate on the blue by slightly changing the switches. Click to get my settings here for the outcome below.

6.Now to bring out some details in the picture it needs to be contrasted and darkened a bit so go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels and put in the following three numbers to see the details immerge.

7. Lastly to get the pink color back where we want it, go to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Selective color and fill in -25 for very bottom box in the Reds channel and then the following settings below for the Neutrals channel.

8. To get a black border like mine in the layout I had put up, make a new layer (Layer > New) and set it just below your first coloring layer that you did in step #3. Fill that layer with black and then use the rectangular maraguee tool to draw yourself a box and then hit delete so you end up with just a black outline. Set that layer to Overlay 58% opacity and you have the border!

That’s all there is to it, click here for the full layer settings!

Click to see the final outcome!

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