Mastering Night Street Photography Edits in Lightroom
Introduction
‘Keep your edits simple’.
That's what my mother always said to me when I was growing up.
But seriously, this. really is the best way of handling your night street photography photos in post-processing.
So how do you go about editing your twilight streets photography images in Lightroom?
Let's get into it.
What makes a bad night street photography edit?
When I first started out on my photography journey, before I really got into street photography and was focusing my efforts on still life and landscape photography, I used to really get into editing my images. This meant that I took up to an hour adding detail, adding colour, adding clarity, reducing the Highlights slider to 0 and increasing the Shadows slider to 100...
Do you get my drift? Basically, I was overdoing it, creating overprocessed images that looked like HDR nightmares.
Luckily, I do not punish myself for doing this. I simply put it down to inexperience.
Bringing it back to now, what I'm trying to say by divulging my dark past, is that the worst thing that you can do to your night streets photography images is to overedit them. The sliders should generally be used subtly. This includes the main sliders that you will use to make your night street photography edits look awesome.
Sliders
Let's briefly take a look at each slider.
Exposure slider - This tool adjusts the complete brightness and darkness of your photo.
Contrast slider - This slider darkens the darker areas of the mid-tones and brightens the brighter parts of the mid-tones. Pull it to the right to add contrast between those tones and if you crank it to the left there will be less contrast between the darker and the brighter mid-tones.
Highlights slider - Works with the brightest parts of the image that are not white. Reducing the slider makes the brightest parts of the image darker and increasing the slider makes them brighter.
Shadows slider - Adjusts the darker areas of the image. Increasing the Shadows slider will make the dark parts brighter, whereas decreasing it will make those areas darker.
Whites slider - Related to the Highlights slider, this slider works with the white areas of the image. Increase the whites or decrease them. You can also set a white point, which tells Lightroom what you want the brightest point of your photo to be.
Blacks slider - This slider works with the darkest areas of your image and if you move the slider to the left you can create a black point that will create a portion of the image that is black and can help to add contrast. Move it to the right to increase the black portions of your image (make them brighter).
Texture slider - using this slider will add or subtract medium-sized texture to an image without adding fine detail.
Clarity slider - This slider is similar to the Contrast slider in that it impacts the mid-tones when you push it to the right. However, pushing it to the right also adds detail and texture. Whereas reducing the Clarity slider takes away detail and texture.
Dehaze slider - Quite simply, taking it to the right removes atmospheric haze. To the left, adds atmospheric haze.
Vibrance slider - This is like a smart Saturation slider. whilst it adds saturation to an image, it protects already saturated areas and also colours that are found in skin tones.
Saturation slider - This slider, when pushed to the right, makes every colour in your image more intense. Drag it to the left and you will desaturate those colours.
The Tone Curve - Whereas the sliders give you an overall adjustment, this tool gives you granular targeted control over the light and dark areas of your image and by doing so can also add contrast. There are various tones you can adjust with the Tone Curve. Using the RGB Curve you can work on Shadows, Darks, Mid-tones, Lights and Highlights. Colours can be adjusted using the separate red, blue and green curves.
Colour Grading - Add some flair to your night street photography image by using the colour wheels in this tool. Here you can adjust the hues, saturation, and tonal values of the colours in the shadow areas, the mid-tones and the highlights of your photo. You can also get granular by blending and balancing the colours as well.
Sharpening slider - Sharpens the overall image. Where you want your sharpening to be applied can be controlled with the Masking slider. The Radius slider controls the thickness of the edge where contrast is applied. A lower value gives you a thinner edge; a larger value gives you a thicker edge. The Detail slider controls the amount of sharpening added to the details in your image. A low value sharpens only larger edges, while a high value sharpens the smallest details. A high value can create noise in your photos.
Noise Reduction slider - Does just that. Reduces noise in your photos.
Grain slider - Adjusting this slider will add more or less grain in your images. You can also adjust the size of the grain and the roughness as well.
Masking tools - Use the Brush, the Radial filter or the Linear Gradient filter to add local adjustments to any area of your photo.
I sometimes use all of these sliders and techniques and sometimes only a few. It really comes down to what you feel is the right tool to use at the right time.
What makes a good night street photography edit?
A good night streets photography edit is the opposite of a bad one - use each slider subtly. You ultimately want a natural-looking photo in terms of Saturation, Highlights, Shadows, Detail and Clarity. Obviously, if you have underexposed for a particular reason, like shooting for the highlights in the street lamps, then by all means increase the exposure (which I find preferable to increasing the shadows).
If you want to work quickly and you know what colours you love in your images and you want to put your own stamp on the final result, then use Presets to give your photos a certain vibe.
Also, sometimes actually subtracting Clarity works particularly well for night street photography images, as it can give your photos a soft, ethereal vibe and can make the street lamps and shop lights glow as can subtly reducing the Dehaze slider.
3 Simple Editing Techniques
The three editing techniques that you're going to learn in this video are pretty simple really. In one photo I will colour grade the image myself, using the Lightroom Colour Grading tool. In the second, I will use a preset that I often use in my images. Finally, we will strip back the editing process and simply use the sliders to get a natural, finished look. Enjoy!
Conclusion
As you can see there aren't any great tricks or complicated techniques that I use to edit my night St photography images. Take some photos tonight and give it a go!
Go forth and create.