On a recent trip to New York, I did a lot of street photography, some done in the evening. As much of the subject matter was moving, the camera was handheld, so a very high ISO was used during the evening. I could have placed the camera on a tripod and approached the following example quite differently, but making images late at night handheld, I was not carrying a tripod. Also, setting up a tripod at night in the street is awkward and perhaps draws too much attention to one’s equipment. However, this led me to a very interesting way to process such images. (If you are interested in night photography techniques, both on and off the tripod, you could refer to my article titled Low Light Challenge.)

After spending some time in post-processing trying to decide how to work with the noise created by such high ISOs, I discovered a fairly straightforward way to create very painterly-looking images. Examples of these images are in the following gallery: Streets of New York. The first twenty or so images will give you a good idea of the end product of this process; the image below is included in this gallery. What follows is a step-by-step illustration of the process

I used the following eight images to create a panorama image. This was necessary as I was using a 35mm equivalent lens and did not have the ability to change to a wide-angle lens. I would also argue that often, in these situations, a panorama image is less distorted than having to use an ultrawide lens. If you are interested in the process of creating panoramic photographs, I cover this topic in another article: click here to go to that article.

The images were then all selected and run through Lightroom noise reduction AI software, which DNG files. In order to see the difference between the original RAW image and the AI noise reduction I have enlarged the centre of the image and increased the exposure by 3.5 stops. This shows a dramatic difference.

I then selected the Lightroom tool Merge to Panorama, chose the Spherical option, and used the auto-toning button in Lightroom so I could see the building a bit better.

I then decided to crop the image and make some further adjustments. Rather than try and increase the exposure I chose to use the Shadow and White tone sliders to increase the light on the building. At this point you can see the impact of the AI noise reduction by comparing the image below and the following one.

The following images are from panorama merge without using the AI noise reduction program. The second image has similar adjustments made to those used in the image above. Again you will want to click the images above and below to see the difference in the detail.

At this point, the blacks in the sky were problematic, so I used the masking feature to select the sky and made the adjustments illustrated below. These adjustments were only made to the area above the building, and there was a diffusion adjustment where the sky meets the building.

I then inverted the mask and made the following adjustments to the building while not altering the sky.

At this point, I used Lightroom to move the image into Photoshop, the Nik Collection plug is integrated into my Photoshop program. I then selected the Nik 7 Viveza program, a colour and toning tool. Using this program, I made some minor adjustments to the image.

Once the adjustments were made, I applied the changes, and the adjusted image came back to Photoshop as a new layer. I then selected the Nik 7 Colour Efex program to process the image further. In the tool I used the Detail Extractor, Tonal Contrast, and Midnight to modify the image. The intent is to move toward a more painterly look to the image and tone down the intensity of the colours and light.

At this point, the image is then saved in Photoshop, which automatically returns the new version of the image into Lightroom as a TIF; as I did not flatten this image, it retained the various layers that were created in Photoshop using the Nik programs. This means if I am not happy with some of the adjustments, I can use opacity settings or other adjustments to tweak the image.

Equipment Used

The following images were created on an X100 VI in April of 2024 at 10 pm. They are hand-held images at 1/125 and f4 at 12,800 ISO. For those unfamiliar with the camera it is a fixed lens camera with 23mm (APSC) lens, so in 35 mm terms this is a 35mm lens. The resolution of the camera is 40 megapixels. If you are interested in more information about this camera; click here to go to the article.