Another starting point might be to try Color Curves, use the setting "Night".

- Ray
Underground Planet

P.S. Just saw you said the same thing ... D. Collins, what he said!

Wow! I didn't know that was in there. I see what you mean about the sky, which is about a third of my framing, and adds a lot of blue cast to the pavement.

I'll play around with it, now that I know what to tweak. Thanks to you both.

Convincing day for night is critically dependent on how it is shot. Simply applying a filter won't do it unless the rest of it is done well. Have a read through http://www.cinematography.net/edited-pages/DayForNight-AdditionalShootingInformation.htmday for night [/link], noting that this is talking about shooting film negative. Just pick out the bits about lighting and shooting, and skip printer lights and all the stuff particular to film.

EDIT: in case you don't want to enrol in the CML site, here are some snippets:

"don't forget that the most convincing DFN is shot backlit or 3/4 backlit, so that the camera is looking at mostly shadows. High overhead sun or front light will tend to look like just an exposure error. Of course, this means that you are looking towards the hottest part of the sky, so you want to avoid sky. Polarisers won't work on this area of the sky, but grads can help if you just can't avoid some sky. You'll need something on the order of ND9 and bring the blend down across the horizon. This works only if your foreground action is below the horizon.
I have even cut a gel ND filter to conform to a mountain shape in the background and positioned it in the matte box to fit the jagged horizon line."

"The thing to remember about DFN, especially in a shadowy location like the woods, is that once you darken the image enough to look like night, you have to consider how to direct the eye to what's important in the shadows. This may mean adding more fill light to certain areas to bring out detail. In a print, objects that are three to four stops under will tend to go black, so if your highlights are already one stop under, that doesn't leave many stops that your shadows can be before they go black (although of course, you probably want some black shadows). So you may want to use lights or reflectors to selectively punch up some dark areas so that there is still detail once you darken the image. Of course, if you shoot in overcast, this may be less of an issue since you already have a low-contrast image."

"This goes hand in hand with the apparently desaturated look of night vision. At low light levels in the eye the non-colour rods take over from the r,g,b cones in the eye, leading to an increasing proportion of b/w vision as the light falls. Moreover, the peak sensitivity of the rods is in the green part of the spectrum, so greens appear as a brighter shade of grey than corresponding reds and blues.

More generally there is an overall shift in sensitivity towards the blue end of the (cones overall peak in yellow, rods in green) so all colours seem to shift slightly towards blue. (Look up the Purkinje effect.) This is a matter of vision rather than actual colour temperature.

In actual fact, moonlight tends to be a lower colour temp than daylight (it's usually quoted at 4000K) in other words it's redder, but because we tend to see night exteriors in comparison with even warmer artificial light (in house windows etc) it appears cooler. This is probably the reason we have adopted the conventional representation of moonlight as blue.
So I've just argued that moonlight is actually redder, visually greener, and psychologically bluer than daylight.
Next week, black is white..."

"Modern effects allow you to take DFN work and make the sky realistically dark, even adding stars. This worked well for the early night scenes in "Cast Away" -- digital efx added a dark sky and a glow to his flashlight. But shooting during the day allowed the ocean to be "lit" for miles."

And you need someone in the shot to pull out a pocket watch etc and make some comment about "here it is midnight and the train still isn't here" :-)
(always amazed at how many movies and things I have seen (MASH etc) where they set the stage with comments about how early it is and nobody notices that with those shadows, it is almost noon !!

mikey

Serena - Thank you for you comments, very interesting, although some of it was way over my head. With your depth of knowledge, you would be the perfect candidate for write a book on how to edit for best results. What are the best setting to use for different projects. As an example, I recently read somewhere that you should color correct clips before they are connected by butting or cross fading. In fact, it when so far as saying not to assemble in NLE, but in Afterlife. He wasn't talking about Vegas in this example. That seems almost impossible to me. At any rate, a simple 'how to or how best to', book would be great.

I wish I had asked for advice before shooting, so I could have avoided the sky – next time.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience.

Mikey - I like the idea of looking at the watch - I'll bet that does go a long way.