Barcelona, Spain.

First, a quick note: We are traveling for the rest of the month, so internet access will likely be sparse. If I am slow to respond to comments, it’s due to my lack of connectivity. More on that journey in the months to come.

About a month ago, I posted an altered photo of a mission church in Scottsdale, Arizona. I really enjoyed the process of converting day into night. Over the years, I’ve played with the process, but the only lamps I ever tried to light were in lighthouse photos. Jamie R. Mathlin taught me some tricks for using Lightroom to light street lamps. The link in his name features one of the videos I used to learn the technique.

On a day tour of Barcelona, the guide drove us through Oldtown. As we rode down a narrow street at midday, I snapped a cellpic of the scene through the windshield with my Samsung S23U cellphone. Some of the stores in the building on the right were closed. I’m assuming they happened to be vacant, but that gave me the idea to create a night scene as the stores would be shuttered at night.

The four street lamps in the photo provide street lighting. In the distance, a person was walking with a scooter. As luck would have it, he was walking directly under a light, so he gave me a subject at the end of the building’s leading lines. The new AI tools in Lightroom made this playtime a realistic task for me. I converted the image in about 90 minutes of editing.

About the conversion: I’d initially tried to use Luminar Neo’s masking ability to duplicate the techniques, but I gave up as Neo’s masking wasn’t up to the level of Lightroom Classic’s masking for this conversion. (Or maybe I haven’t figured out the best way to light street lamps in Neo.)

I began by cropping out the dash at the bottom of the image. I removed the person and the four security posts in the left foreground using AI erase tools. My next task was to darken the sky, and that very bright building bathed in direct sunlight in the background. Lightroom’s Sky and Object Masking selected the appropriate areas, and I used a brush tool to tweak the edges in areas where the mask missed. Reducing the exposure was all I needed.

Then I started on the lights. Each lamp requires three radial fills. A tiny radial fill is modified into an oval and given a very high exposure to light in the lamp’s internal area. Then, a larger oval fill lights the wall behind the lamp. Finally, copying that fill and rotating it to fit on the ground below the lamp provides illumination on the street. I used the copy function in the mask elements to illuminate the other three lamps, shrinking them and repositioning them to the appropriate areas.

Finally, I noticed some bright reflections on the upper floor of the building on the right. They were probably reflections of sunlight from the windows on the left building. Rather than darken those reflections, I created additional lights in the left windows on the upper floors. In my altered reality, those sunlight reflections are light from the windows on the left illuminating the adjacent wall.

I thought I was finished with the post, but after a night’s sleep, I remembered that one of my plans was to finish the image with Silver Efex Pro 3 in black and white. One of my favorite presets in Silver Efex is Wet Rocks, but I sampled many others before choosing it as a starting point. From there, I only changed the overall tint to a slight blue tone to give it a cool color nighttime feel. Then, a light vignette finished the image.

In the comments, let me know which version of my edits you prefer, the color or the black-and-white image. To better view the photos in 2K HD and on a dark background, they are posted in my Flickr album here.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s also acceptable. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner