As you can see, this one was taken in broad daylight and processed to look like a night scene. I used a polariser, but boosted the exposure in PS to bring out more of the house detail before I started the artistic stuff, so the sky ended up being quite light.
I shot RAW, then the processing to transform the original was:
- normal exposure, shadows, brightness and contrast in PS CS ACR
- skew (slightly) to correct perspective
- crop
- Neat Image to reduce noise and sharpen a bit, although noise reduction probably academic for this kind of image result
- select the sky/clouds/trees (everything except the house) and fill with dark purple on a new layer; I filled with white, then used hue/saturation with hue at about 240, saturation at about 50-70% and brightness at about -80
- desaturate the house to 50%; colours are not only dimmer, but also appear less saturated when it's darker
- the curves are the key to this one; I wanted the image to be a lot darker, but I also wanted reasonable contrast; the trick was to split the brightness spectrum in two and invert one half of it so that both halves can have reasonable contrast without either one being very bright
- curves on the house with a U shaped curve on an adjustment layer above the house layer but below the sky layer to make it easier to adjust later: I don't remember the exact values, but they were something like start at about 0, 80 (or 0, 100), then down to 128,0 and up to 255,100 (or 255, 120); this inverts the darker bits while retaining the normal toning of the brighter bits like the roof and keeps the chimney shadow looking like a shadow; it also makes the dark flying pigeon lighter to stand out better
- use color range to select the brightest bits of the house and adjust the tonal range (with curves) to make them darker to blend in with the rest better
- adjust the hue of the house to create the purple edge of the roof along with the other resulting colours you can see in the final image
- select the window areas, including the adjacent areas that would be illuminated by light coming through them and fill them with orange on a new layer; adjust layer opacity to 50% to show some original detail and tone down the strength of the light
- select the window areas where light is coming out directly, copy to a new layer and adjust to 50% opacity; that makes those directly lit parts of the window brighter than the indirectly lit bits
- normal resizing and a bit of USM plus framing to finish off
 comp entry
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