Day for night: make daytime footage look like night

The name describes the job: day stands in for night. The French call it “la nuit américaine”, American night, after the Hollywood westerns that used it so much, and François Truffaut took that phrase as the title of his 1973 film about film-making, released in English as “Day for Night”. For most of cinema history it was the only practical way to show a wide night landscape: film stock was too slow to record moonlight, and lighting a whole valley was out of the question.

It is still used. Modern cameras can shoot in very low light, but a night exterior still needs a lot of lighting, a crew working through the night and a sky that does what it is told. Shooting in daylight and grading to night is cheaper, and it gives the editor control. Night exteriors in “Mad Max: Fury Road” were famously shot this way, and Jordan Peele’s “Nope” filmed its night scenes in daylight, pairing a film camera with an infrared one so the sky could be turned black.

Most failed attempts were lost on the day, not in the grade. Plan for these:

• Keep the sky out, or make it dark. A bright sky is the biggest giveaway. Shoot slightly downwards, frame against buildings, trees or hills, or use a polarising filter or a graduated ND filter to darken what sky remains.
• Use side or back light. Moonlight is a single, hard source. A sun low behind or beside the subject gives rim light that reads as moonlight; front light from a high sun looks like noon however dark you make it.
• Underexpose a little in camera. Around one stop under keeps the highlights safe for grading. Shooting in a log profile or RAW video gives more room still.
• Avoid hard, short shadows. Short, crisp midday shadows say “noon”. Late afternoon, or an overcast day with a dark sky, is easier.
• Add lights that only make sense at night. Car headlights, lit windows, a torch or a campfire in frame sell the illusion more than any grade.
• Mind the white balance. Many cinematographers set tungsten white balance (around 3200 K) under daylight to bake in a blue cast. If you plan to grade, shooting at daylight balance and adding the blue later keeps more options open.

Whatever the editor, the recipe has the same five parts. The Day for night look sets all of them in one go:

1. Darken: exposure comes down by around one and a half to two stops (the look uses −1.6 EV).
2. Crush the highlights: night has no bright sky, so the top of the range is pulled down hard (Highlights −80, Whites −55) instead of just being dimmed.
3. Drain the colour: at night the eye relies on rods, which see little colour, so saturation drops sharply (−55).
4. Add moonlight: a cool blue cast and a blue-black floor, so shadows read as night sky rather than ink. In this tool that is Moonlight, set to 80% by the look.
5. Vignette the edges: a single light source falls off towards the frame edge. Moonlight includes a soft vignette.

Strength scales all five together, including Moonlight, so the result stays consistent as you go darker. If faces disappear, raise Blacks a few points; if it still looks like an overcast afternoon, the sky is usually the reason (see the limits below).

The look applies the same grade to the whole frame, every frame. It does not find and darken the sky on its own, it can’t remove sunlit shadows, and it doesn’t relight the scene. Footage shot with the advice above converts well; a midday shot with a bright blue sky across half the frame will look like a stormy afternoon at best.

For shots that need the sky treated separately, grade in an editor with masks, such as DaVinci Resolve (a window or a qualifier on the sky) or Premiere Pro (a mask on a colour adjustment). The guides for DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro cover the darkening part of that work.

Phones make the shooting part easy to get wrong, because they brighten dark scenes automatically. Lock exposure before you film: on iPhone, press and hold on the subject until AE/AF Lock appears, then drag the sun icon down; on most Android camera apps, tap to focus and use the exposure slider beside the focus point. Point away from the sky, then open the clip on this page in Safari or Chrome and choose Day for night.