I have a night time shot of a city sky line, so most of the buildings have some lights on and then there are also building names that are lit up on some buildings. It's a medium shot so you can see about 1o building across. I need to turnout all of the lights in this shot. On most of the buildings you are actually able to see building between each pane of glass. I tried loading a luminosity mask and then just filling with a color of one of the buildings, but it just doesn't look right because of the glow from the lights. Another issue is that there is a church in the foreground and the front of that church is completely lit up. Plus there is a cruise ship in the foreground who's lights a creating large areas with no detail. So any one have any ideas on the best way of going about creating a "brown out"?

If you'd post a picture or portion of the picture we can play with it and come up with some ideas for you.

Check HERE (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/image-help/9077-size-quality-attached-images.html) if you don't know how to upload a good size photo.

As Swampy indicated, it would be helpful if we had a sample of your photo. I have done some things similar, and there is a couple of approaches to this problem. One way, is to actually create you night scene from a daytime shot, where you have less lighting disparity. You would then darken the photo using levels or curves, to convert is to a night scene with out the lights. You can then add the lights that you want. This method can be easier than removing the light in some cases.

Here is a small portion of the image. I would probably be better to start with a daytime time shot, but they have already purchased this stock. So any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve

Hi there,

turning off all the lights, that's what I can't do with this, so I'm interested too!

I could turn them off about 35%

The problem seems to be light source. If you turn all the lights off (paint them out in any way), you don't really have enough background light to silhouette the buildings. It seems it would be easier to do if you had a daytime shot to start with.

You've selected quite a challenge for your self. It can be done, but will need quite a bit of work, with a lot of attention to detail. I would select each area seperatley, and create layer masks to handle just that area. You can then add and adjustment, or paint out the lights individually. The blown out areas on the ship, should probably brought all of the way down to black, to make them appear to be in the dark, unless you have something that you want to edit in to that area.

Thought I would try A quick Brown out.. by turning the lights down... left the buildings and skyline alone..
Selected>color range, Selected bright lights adjusted fuzziness till boat side was dark.. selected OK

Image>Adjustments>hue/saturation> saturation +85, lightness -22... Selected OK (OR adjust to your taste)
deselect

Selected>color range, Selected bright lights adjusted fuzziness till boat side was dark.. selected OK
Image>Adjustments>hue/saturation> saturation +85, lightness -22... Selected OK
Deselect

Selected>color range, Selected yellow lights adjusted fuzziness till boat side was dark.. selected OK
Image>Adjustments>hue/saturation> saturation +51, lightness -26... Selected OK
Deselect

Selected>color range, Selected yellow lights, selected OK
Image>Adjustments>hue/saturation> lightness -36... Selected OK
Deselected, Etc, etc..

Adjust to your own taste

(A slight Gaussian Blur may have helped while selected... or make a mask from selections and blur mask?) J

just a thought

Added... you could select each building and using the same color range method to select the lights... turn them off by adding the color of the OFF rooms..