Stormy night - Photoediting

Take a very pleasant day and turn it into a stormy night photo. To do this you can download the photo of teton lake that is the 5th from the last in the Wyoming section.

1. Open your image up in Photoshop and duplicate the background layer. Turn the eye off on the background layer and highlight the background copy.

2. Select your magic wand set with the following options:

• Add to selection selected.
• tolerance = 32
• antialias = checked
• contiguous = checked
• use all layers unchecked.

Click in the sky right near the mountains. Go up above the selection and click in the sky. continue clicking in the unselected areas of the sky until all the sky is selected. Set the magic wand options back to normal "new selection".

3. Click Select=> Inverse. Click the "add layer mask" button on the bottom of the layers palette.

4. Insert a new layer called clouds above the background layer, below the background copy. Hit your D key to set default colors. Click filter=> render=>clouds.

5. Click image=> adjust=> Hue/saturation

• colorize checked
• Hue 239
• Saturation 100
• Lightness -50

5. Insert a new layer called lightning. Set your colors to default by hitting your D key. Draw a gradient from left to right on your canvas.

6. Click Filter=>render=> Difference Clouds.

7. Click Image=> adjust=> Invert

8. Click Image=>adjust=>levels. Move the black input carrot to the right till it is nearly touching the other two.
 

8. Click Image => Adjust => Hue/saturation.

• colorize= checked
• hue 5
• saturation = 63
• lightness = 0

9. Set the layer mode to screen.

10. Duplicate this lightning layer and drag the lightning copy layer to the top.

11. Click on the lightning layer and with your move tool and bounding boxes showing, resize the image to 50% height and 50% width. move it to where it appears to come off one of the highest peaks.

12. Click on the lightning copy. Click edit=> transform=> flip vertical. Resize to 40% height and width. Drag the lightning copy image so that it begins at the reflection of the peak the lighting touches and goes off the bottom of the image. take this layer and set to 30% opacity. Apply a Gaussian blur of 3.0.

13. If your making the animation, you want to preserve the lightness, if you are making the static image you will want to darken your image by doing this step. Click on your background copy and click Image=> Adjust=> Brightness/contrast.  Set the brightness to -90.

You can stop here or go on to make an animation of the lightning strike below.

14. Insert a layer above this image called "light". Select your gradient tool to reflected gradient. Draw the gradient on this new layer from the center of the lightning to the side(or perpendicular to your lightning strike) Set this layer to Multiply and 50% opacity. and turn it off.

15. Insert a new layer above this called "dark" and fill with black. Set this layer to 52% opacity. Switch to Image Ready.

16.  Turn on all layers except the light, lightning copy and lightning. Open your animation panel. Set the current frame to 2 seconds. Duplicate current frame three times.

On Frame 2 and 4,  Turn off the dark layer and turn on light, and the lightning and lightning copy layers.

Set frames 2, 3, and 4 to no delay in time. 

17. Resize your image by clicking image=> image size so that the animation is not so huge. You may want it at 200 pixels wide. Optimize and save optimized as. I saved this with 32 colors and 70 % dither.