Dark photos and treatment

My attempts at night photography rely on artificial light. Far from cursing streetlights, as Andrew Denny does, I need them to supply the light my compact camera needs. Here's an example of one of my pictures where I needed that extra illumination. The longest exposure the camera will do is eight seconds. This is Shadow tied up at Bettisfield on the Llangollen Canal last October.


As you can see, it's like looking at coal in a cellar at night with the lights off.

But I can tweak the picture in iPhoto to increase the "exposure". It gets grainier the more I do it, but at least you can see something.


OK, not a lot, but I think you'll agree there's a bridge hole with some trees against the sky.

iPhoto has tweaks for colour temperature, tint, saturation etc. I've helped myself to one of Andrew Denny's recent photos from his post linked to above (thanks, Andrew) to show what it can do. I can't lose the sodium yellow altogether, but I think the gate's now blue shadow is interesting!


And here is Mr. Denny's streetlit original.


Hey, look, the shrubs in the treated picture are a more realistic green colour!

Don't bother clicking on the above two photos, by the way. They won't get much bigger. I borrowed the original just to show what can be done to counter - or attempt to counter - the chromatic effects of streetlighting. I promise to make my own photos published here clickable and large enough so see anything worth seeing. Photos which I deem less worthy might be smaller.

(edited to add: If I remember correctly all I adjusted was colour temperature, going through the loop several times. So, from a photo which looked monochrome, I managed to recover some of (what I imagine are) the original colours.)