Yesterday, I posted some images from doing nighttime photography down in Long Beach, but I didn’t share the image I spent the most time on.

In Capture One, I adjusted the image using the Color Editor tool in two ways: I selected red and changed the hue to more of a pink color, and a selected yellow and desaturated the yellows in the photo. That produced cleaner looking light trails, and gave the red lights in the photos a matching appearance with the pink Ferris wheel.

Next, I loaded the image in Photoshop and put a gradient of pink upward at 45 degrees from the bottom right and set the layer to “color dodge.” Next, I created a new layer with an orange oval that I applied a blur to and reduced the opacity of, and positioned over the approaching headlights so that there was a more pronounced glow from approaching traffic. Lastly, sort of mirroring the first gradient, I put a gradient from the top left corner downward at 45 degrees in a purple color – so a cooler color than the bottom right. I set the layer to color burn and reduced the opacity to 20%. Here’s the result – a slightly fantastic take on the Long Beach.