Get the Look: Cityscape colour

Enhance artificially lit exteriors by adjusting colours for creative effects

Colour is a powerful element to work with in Photoshop. The act of adjusting colours can create a multitude of results, ranging from corrective effects to special and creative effects. Maintaining a sense of reality is always important, because you can easily push and pull colours around in such a way that images begin to look like a psychedelic nightmare. With careful and refined application, however, you can achieve subtle results that blend seamlessly with the original colours.

Natural colour always looks best, even when hues have been shifted away from their starting point. So, in this month’s four techniques, we’re going to look at different ways in which you can shift the colours present in an image to provide effects that work perfectly for artificially lit cityscape images. These effects can also work for landscapes and daylight cityscapes, of course, so you can try them with a wide range of your images.

1 Cool down

Click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon, which is the half-black half-white circle at the bottom of the Layers Panel, and select Photo Filter from the list of options. When the dialog box opens, click on the dropdown menu set to Warming Filter (85) by default and select Cooling Filter (80). For this image, setting Density to 20% reduces the slight yellow colour cast – but it’s stronger than is needed to neutralise the cast, so it also cools the scene.

2 Brilliant blackand‑white

Create a Black & White Adjustment Layer. When the dialog box opens, use the sliders to control how the associated colours in the image convert to greyscale; move the sliders to the left to darken, and to the right to lighten. For this image, Red was increased to 192 to lighten bricks, Green was set to 124 to lighten the lit windows, and Blue was taken up to 100 to lighten the sky. Watch out with Blues, as this is the noisiest channel.

3 Desaturate a colour cast

There are many ways of removing colour casts. One that’s not as common as some, but can produce a distinctive result, is to desaturate the offending colours in the image. To do this, create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and use the dropdown menu set to Master to adjust Hue, Saturation and Lightness. For this image, the Saturation of Yellows was set to -45, and the Saturation of Greens was reduced to -50.

4 Adjust the sky colour

Create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer, and use the dropdown menu to select Blues. Now you can simply move the Hue slider to change the colour of anything blue in the image. The other colour channels work in the same way. To make the sky a more surreal tone of blue, for example, move the Hue slider to -25. Different skies in other photos will need different adjustments made to the Blues, since the original shade of blue will be different.