Day to Night

The presenter does a fair job of creating two different day-to-night conversions, but one “day” image is during blue hour (which is almost night already) and the other is at sunset (again, almost night). So there’s not a lot of editing necessary to pull off adding stars to the scene. I would have really liked to see more of a daylight image used as a starting point. The instructor doesn’t strike me as being terribly experienced in photo editing, and makes creating these composites much more difficult than he needs to. For example, using an inverted sky mask to adjust foreground colors to match the sky, when the simpler solution is to just move the color layer under the sky folder. Also, he uses luminosity masks for editing some areas of the image, but uses much harder methods when masking in a new sky. For the central tree on the second image, a luminosity mask would have been the easiest way to blend that in with the sky. Either that, or making the sky’s blending mode Darken, which would have blended with the tree totally seamlessly. I know there are a ton of ways of doing the same thing in Photoshop; this is all just my opinion. But sometimes it’s nice to see how others edit their photos, and that’s kind of how I viewed this course: nice to look over someone’s shoulder, but nothing really new to learn.