Enhancing Night and Low-Light Photos with Photoshop

Learn how to use Camera Raw and Photoshop to make your night and low-light photos look their best. Explore the basics like noise reduction, as well as more advanced techniques.

Introduction

• Enhancing your night photography skills
• What you should know

1. General Enhancements in Lightroom or Camera Raw

• Working with Camera Raw from Bridge
• Set overall tonal balance
• Use neutral guides to set white balance
• Color balance for creative effect
• Use Dehaze on night photos
• Removing chromatic aberration
• Fine-tune with local adjustments
• Synchronize settings to multiple files

2. Noise Reduction

• How exposure affects noise levels
• Camera Raw for noise reduction
• Open a raw file as a Smart Object
• The Reduce Noise filter
• Photoshop Dust & Scratches filter

3. Using Photoshop and Camera Raw for HDR Night Shots

• Merge to HDR in Camera Raw
• Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop
• Toning 32-bit HDR files in Camera Raw
• Saving 32-bit HDR files in Photoshop

4. Using Layers to Enhance Night Exposures

• Layer stacking to blend lighter areas
• Aligning misaligned layers
• Combine exposures with a layer mask
• Refine with creative adjustments

5. Star Photography Post-Processing

• Retouching airplane light trails
• Exposure stacking to create star trails
• Create a star comet effect
• Create a luminosity mask
• Luminosity masks for the Milky Way
• Making a constellation more visible
• Removing blurry stars
• Adding new stars

Conclusion

• Next steps