Pixel Night City

[Dulce Donten]

Shootingphotos in Rome at night, is great fun, but also a big problem when you start post processing the photos. The city lights are VERY yellow, even when you are on location and looking at it. When we walked around and shot photos along the River of Tiber, I just knew that colors would be a problem. This is not the first time I have encountered such yellow city lights. I also experienced it Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. They use some kind of LED lamps, with a very yellow glow.

Usually, the color of city lights is somewhere between 2200 kelvin and 3300. Modern LED lamps tend to be in the lower end of the span, but there is only way to find out, and that is by adjusting the temperature.

This usually brings you to the right temperature, but with the city lights of Rome, I found that I hit the bottom, which is 2000 degrees Kelvin, before I am happy. And I am only JUST happy and not really happy. No flexibility at all.

This is much better, but there is still a purple and yellow hue to the statue. To adjust this, I can use the Tint slider, but before doing that, I will show you a little trick. The trick will make it quite easy to find the best possible white balance much easier.

Tip: Before adjusting the temperature and tint slider, I dial up the Vibrance and the Saturation to 100. I am not going to leave them in this place, but it makes it easier to spot color casts because they are exaggerated.

I adjust the Temperature and the Tint to find a compromise. My aim is to balance the amount of blue and yellow and purple or green. This IS a compromise, but when the balance is found, I have found the best possible white balance. I will have to make local adjustments to make changes to it.

While this has got a little more purple, it also has less yellow. It turned out, that some of the yellow really was too much green. The compromis is to accept a bit more purple in the image over all, but purple can be removed, using the HSL panel, in Lightroom, if need be (so can yellow for that matter).

I still had to work with the colors, but in general I have am rid of the super duper yellow image, and have something in the natural world. There is a purple hue, but that can fairly easy be removed using either Photoshop or Lightroom.

It took me about 3 days to complete this artwork. I present to you a portrait of a girl listening to music with the night city in the background. I originally wanted to design the city with a more futuristic, steam punk like style but decided to go with simple buildings with neon light banners.

While I have been doing Pixel Art for about 2 years, most of my designs are relatively simple ones such as space ships or food icons. I decided it was about time I tried doing something larger than 48 by 48 pixel and this was the end result.

Getting an image you like enough to print and put on your wall isn't just a case of waiting for darkness and whipping out your phone. You'll still need to put in some work to take shots that you'll want to look back on in years to come.

If your phone has a night mode, it's important to make sure it's actually activated before you start shooting. On phones like the iPhone 15 series, or other recent iPhones, night mode will automatically kick in when the phone detects you're in a low-light situation. Some Android phones have automatic night modes too, while others will require you to use specific night shooting modes (on the Galaxy S24 range it's called simply Night; on the Pixel 8 it's Night Sight).

Different phones may have different options or naming conventions, so if you're unsure how to use yours -- or if your phone even has one -- then a quick Google search of the model and "night mode" should answer your questions. Night modes have increasingly become a must-have feature on camera phones, so odds are if you've bought a new phone in the past couple of years, then it'll have some kind of night mode built in.

Although recent iPhones and Galaxy phones can take amazing low-light images, you still need to have some light in the shot to make a compelling image. So, heading into the darkest part of a forest isn't likely to give you good results. Instead, try going to populated areas like city centers, where you'll find light sources in the form of street lamps, shop window displays and maybe even some festive lighting during the holidays.

Great city and street photography often include a person as a subject in your shot, and nighttime can be an awesome time to take those images. When the light is limited, you need to make sure that person is exactly where you want them to be, and that can involve some patience.

Both of these night-mode images rely heavily on timing -- on the left it was getting the lone figure walking in the main pool of light on the ground. On the right, it was about capturing the cyclist speeding past.

For instance, imagine you're taking a shot on a road lit by streetlamps. Each lamp casts a pool of light, and as someone walks through it, they're temporarily lit up before becoming effectively invisible again in the darkness. In that situation, my advice is to have your shot ready, with your finger hovering over that shutter button. It may take some minutes of waiting, but eventually, someone will walk exactly through that pool of light and you can take your shot. Patience can really pay off.

Even though night modes on phones don't require a tripod in the same way a multisecond exposure on a DSLR would, you'll still get your best results if you keep the phone as still as possible while taking your image. If you don't have a tripod with you, then look around for a low wall, a trash can or anything you can steady your phone on while you get your shot.

If there's nothing nearby, you can help steady the phone by keeping it firmly in both hands, holding it fairly close to your chest and tucking your elbows in toward your stomach. This will help reduce some of the natural wobble in your hands and may make the difference in getting a sharper image.

The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro (as well as the earlier Pixel 7 series) can take excellent regular photos at night, but they also have a long-exposure mode that allows you to get some creative shots that would normally only be achievable using a tripod. While the mode works well in the daytime to blur things like waterfalls, it also works extremely well at night, especially for subjects like cars driving down city streets.

The long exposure blurs the headlights and taillights, turning them from static balls of light into ethereal lines, snaking their way through the scene. You'll need to use the phone's Motion mode to get this effect and make sure that Long Exposure is toggled on. Long-exposure photos like this work best when you keep the camera still and take a photo that includes both static subjects (like buildings and streetlamps) and moving subjects (like cars, buses or cyclists). It can take some practice -- and results can be hit and miss -- but when it works, it works really well and adds an extra creative element to your night shots.

Not every phone has this as standard, though, and though there are some third-party apps that aim to replicate it, I haven't found many that really work or that come close to the quality I've achieved with the Pixels.

As with any good photo, taking the shot is only half the story; it's how you edit it that can be the biggest way to transform it into a real piece of art. I use Adobe Lightroom Mobile for most of my editing, but Google's Snapseed is really powerful as well and is totally free on iOS and Android.

By their nature, night photos may well be dark, so it's possible you might want to start by lifting the exposure. Be careful: Low-light images, even good night-mode shots, will have image noise (a fuzzy grain) that will look worse and worse the more you brighten the image. You may need to reduce some of the highlights (especially if you've captured bright street lights) and boost the shadows a touch to balance things out. Pay attention to the details and make sure you're not pushing it too far.

From then on, it's entirely down to what you feel looks good, so spend some time playing around with the tools available and see what you can come up with. I personally find that nighttime scenes can often look great as black and white images because the natural contrast of bright lights and dark backgrounds lends itself well to a monochrome conversion.

Away from human settlements, light still shines. Wildfires and volcanoes rage. Oil and gas wells burn like candles. Auroras dance across the polar skies. Moonlight and starlight reflect off the water, snow, clouds, and deserts. Even the air and ocean sometimes glow.

If combined with thermal (infrared) observations, visible images of moonlit skies can be extremely useful in characterizing the nighttime environment. Clouds are always changing, and there are certain kinds that are more prominent during the night. For instance, fog is more likely to form at night, when the air and surface are cooling and moisture condenses. Convective clouds and thunderstorms tend to form during the day as the Sun heats the surface and destabilizes the lower atmosphere. The properties and distributions of many clouds change rapidly in the transition from sunlight to darkness.

Lit by moonlight, high clouds cast shadows on lower, marine layer clouds off the coast of California in this visible light image (top). Only the high clouds show up in infrared channels (lower) traditionally used for meteorology at night. Low clouds pose serious hazards for air and ship traffic. (View Large Image - NASA Earth Observatory and NOAA National Geophysical Data Center)

Since the 1960s, the U.S. Air Force has operated the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), a series of 18 polar-orbiting satellites that observe clouds and other weather variables in key wavelengths of infrared and visible light. Since 1972, the DMSP satellites have included the Operational Linescan System (OLS), which gives weather forecasters some ability to see in the dark. It has been a highly successful sensor, but it is dependent on older technology with lower resolution than most scientists would like. And for many years, DMSP data were classified.

3a8082e126