City Lights After Dark: ON1 Effects for Night Cityscapes
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In this tutorial, we’re diving into the shimmering world of night cityscapes and how to bring them to life with ON1 Effects. The heart of this edit lies in masking—using it not just as a technical tool, but as a way to guide the viewer’s eye and emphasize what matters most. I’ll walk you through my an example of selectively applying filters like Dynamic Contrast so they support the story of the photo rather than overwhelm it. We’ll use local adjustments and luminosity masks to emphasize light and shadow differences at the horizon.
Masking allows us to sculpt the scene. Whether it’s pulling more clarity into the architecture, softening the light trails from passing cars, or enhancing tonal separation among the elements in your photo, we’re using masks with purpose. It’s about control—knowing exactly where and how your filters affect the photo. If you want to create night images that are both dramatic and refined, this video will help you get there. Let’s get started.
Want to learn more about masking? Check out my course ON1 Masking Mastery.
Tell compelling stories. Become a better photographer.
Story And Vision will help you be a stronger visual storyteller and a better photographer. This 12 chapter video course guides you on how to examine your unprocessed photos more critically and understand the story the subjects tell. Then, pivot your post-processing approach to accentuate, emphasize, and reinforce that story.
11th Edition - Revised for ON1 Photo RAW 2024
Organize, edit, and share your photos with ON1 Photo RAW. This well-illustrated, no-nonsense book explains everything you need to learn ON1 Photo RAW. It is the most comprehensive book on Photo RAW out there.
ON1 Photo RAW Essentials: The Photographer’s Guide To Learning ON1 Photo RAW 2024
ON1 Effects and its 30+ filters make it easy to add style and create the mood you want for your images. The 10 learn-by-example tutorials show you how to get more pop with contrast, audition and blend LUTs, correct color casts, and more.
Adding Style With ON1 Effects will help you craft your signature style and tell your story.
You open a raw landscape photo and see plenty of things you could adjust. How do you decide what the photograph actually needs?
Using an unprocessed Sweet Creek image, I work through the decisions that come before the sliders: finding the subject, choosing a crop, and deciding how light and contrast can guide the viewer’s eye.
Folders and Collections can both look like ways to organize photographs in Lightroom Classic, but they solve different problems. Folders describe where the original photographs physically live. Collections let you bring photographs together without changing that physical organization.
That becomes especially useful when a gallery, project, subject, or other body of work includes photographs stored in many different folders. Collections give you another way to see those photographs together while leaving the originals exactly where they belong.
A cityscape can have plenty of bright lamps and still feel a little flat. Luminar Magic Light tool can bring more atmosphere to those artificial light sources, but applying the same glow everywhere may pull attention away from the parts of the photograph that matter most.
The useful decision is where to let the light shine and where to hold it back. A modest starting adjustment, followed by a few selective changes, can give the scene more life while keeping its lighting believable.
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
Tack Sharp can correct camera shake remarkably well, but applying it across an entire photograph can sharpen areas you intentionally want to keep soft. Water, reflections, and moving subjects can quickly lose their natural character.
By combining Tack Sharp with layers and masks in ON1 Photo RAW, you can correct softness selectively. This approach preserves intentional motion while sharpening the stationary parts of the scene that need help.
For me, one catalog works best because I want a single place for all of my photography, both personal and professional. I can still organize those parts of my library differently without separating them into completely different catalogs.
Organizing a Lightroom catalog can quickly become an exercise in folders, keywords, ratings, and metadata. Before deciding how to use those tools, step back and ask a more important question: What do you eventually want to do with your photographs?
A useful workflow begins with those goals. Once you understand how you want to find, revisit, and share your photographs, you can build a Lightroom system that supports the way you actually think and work.
A dreamy, soft look can be a beautiful way to finish a landscape photograph, but applying that softness everywhere can work against the image. The challenge is deciding where you want the viewer to feel softness and where you want them to see texture and detail.
In this article, I look at a practical way to use Luminar's Mystical tool selectively, keeping the mist and sky soft while preserving the crisp, textured character of the mountains. The result is more than a softer photograph—it creates another kind of contrast that can help direct attention through the image.
Snow in shadow often picks up a strong blue color cast. Some blue belongs there—the area is in shadow, after all—but too much can overwhelm the photograph.
In this video, I’ll show you how I use a targeted Lightroom mask to reduce that blue cast while preserving the depth and shadow in the mountains. The same approach can help with many other color-cast problems in landscape photography.
Scott Davenport
Scott Davenport is a landscape photographer and photo educator and based in San Diego, California. He leads photo workshops, writes photo books, hosts podcasts, makes tutorial videos, and feels weird referring to himself in the 3rd person.
He also can't help getting his feet wet photographing at the beach.
Shape The Light – Tell Your Story
Light shapes your story, and Lightroom gives you the tools to mold it. In Mastering Light & Shadow, we’ll dive into how to read the light in your photos, control it with intention, and shape it to match the story you want to tell. You’ll walk away with practical techniques, clear workflows, and the confidence to interpret your photos and bring your creative vision to life.