Moon light settings in LW?

[Mats_Knutsson]

Hi all,
I tried to simulate a very clear night with a moon strong enough to cast shadow and placed a dark-blue LW-sun with inensity about 20 as the light source. Is there anything else/more I should/could do?
Cheers,
Mats

[Anonymous]

Off the top of my head...

1. Increase the intensity (slightly) of the sun-moon.

2. Add some dim, diffuse lights to bring out the features you want to show.

3. Do an animation instead with a car's headlights passing by

There is a trick photographers use on long exposures (minutes) at night called "painting with light". This involves walking into the shot with a lamp and sweeping it over the stuff you want to show (wearing dark clothes and being sure not to point the light at the camera ). Something like that might help.

[Dwight]

Increase - greatly - the blue sun intensity and make sure there is no ambient light to fill the shadows that should become totally black.

I would NOT use the sun object to make the moon - rather the built-in sun would do the trick becuase the moon has the sharpest light in the cosmos.

The best night photography is done, however, with some light in the sky, usually within a half-hour of sunset, so try to find a better background photo.

[Mats_Knutsson]

Matthew wrote:
Off the top of my head...

1. Increase the intensity (slightly) of the sun-moon.

2. Add some dim, diffuse lights to bring out the features you want to show.

3. Do an animation instead with a car's headlights passing by

There is a trick photographers use on long exposures (minutes) at night called "painting with light". This involves walking into the shot with a lamp and sweeping it over the stuff you want to show (wearing dark clothes and being sure not to point the light at the camera ). Something like that might help.

Thanks for your advices!

1. I used AC sun as Dwight suggested which gives harder more realistic shadows and I actually decreased the sun to 10%.
2. I don't want to show anything else than a generic night light situation (I will pass this one amongst others to my customers). I might add som ext. fixtures later on.
3. I didn't find that particular object...!?...😉

A problemis that I don't have my stuff calibrated. An image in Photoshop CS looks much darker than in ACDSEE...have to sort this out somehow.

Btw I'm a photographer by heart and my favourite paint-with-light-photographer is Emil Schildt (even though he's not into architectural photography).

The blue hour is lovely but here in Sweden it's really short at this time of year... I will bring my camera out and shoot some better evening/night backgrounds than those included in dear ol' AC...

More suggestions are deeply appreciated! I'm trying to learn LW and some GDL right now in between the christmas/new year holidays.

Mats

[Dwight]

There is no way to put an ArchiCAD image into a recognized "color space." This accounts for some of the irregularities with Plotmaker colors.

I am surprized that Photoshop reads ArchiCAD images as dark - I have no issue like that here... having just finished the LightWorks in ArchiCAd book. You mght have a gamma issue with your display. Is it 2.2 or 1.8? When you switch to Photoshop, does the gamma setting change?

Another problem is that all ArchiCAD images always have too much black in them - to be fixed in Photoshop. These images always need lightening, but not brightening - move the center triangle to 1.4 from 1.0 in the Levels dialog to see what I mean.