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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Faking the Moonrise

This moonrise over Kailua Beach, Oahu, Hawaii is actually a sunrise: f/8, 1/400 sec., ISO 100 ~ © Royce Bair MMXI
When to fake a moonrise: It's very important that all my starry night landscape photography ("NightScapes") be as close to my camera raw originals as possible. Other than an increase in sky contrast, I resist heavy Photoshop manipulation. Editorial photography requires a high standard of ethics. Commercial and advertising photography is another matter. Here one is trying only to be illustrative and create an image that sells a product.

Moonrise over Kailua Beach was created purely to be a top stock photo seller, and I have succeeded so well, that it has also become one of the Internet's most often ripped-off images (that can happen, when an image goes viral).

How the illusion was created: To create the above image was ridiculously easy. I started out with a pretty sunrise. That camera raw image was opened within the Adobe Raw Converter (ARC), which is available for Photoshop, Elements, and built into Lightroom (refer to page 115 in my new eBook).

The un-cropped camera raw file opened in the Adobe Raw Converter (ARC)
The next step was to slide the color Temperature to the left —all the way to 2000º Kelvin. Some images may look better at around 2500º, and may need some Tint adjustment as well.

Sliding the color Temperature to the far left (i.e. 2000º) will suddenly give your sunrise a cool "night" look.
Once the image meets your overall tastes for a "night" image, open the image and continue to make adjustments in Photoshop, Lightroom or Elements. That's it!

               Royce's 2015 NightScape Workshop Schedule



1 comment:

  1. Nice and easy tut. In fact, I got into the habit of shooting with Fluorescent WB in sunrise and sunset times in general, while shooting with Tungsten WB in night scenes (away from urban) to keep the sky bluish. Unfortunately, the nature here didn't provide us (yet) with beautiful scenery like the one you have above hehe

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