On top of this was a selective color adjustment layer applying a massive -85% yellow and +78% cyan to all yellow tones. The first thing I did was a hue/saturation layer with the saturation dropped to -27. The Blacktongue Thief, 20×30 inches, oil on panel, 2022 Here was the painting in its original state: Primarily, I knew I needed to do three things: modify values to give an “under-exposed” look, modify hues to emphasize blue tones, and desaturate.

Not really relishing the idea of beginning again from scratch, I decided to attempt my own day-for-night post processing with digital tools. Which brings us back to my blunder on the Blacktongue Thief cover. And because our eyes begin to fail below a certain brightness threshold (again, the Purkinje effect), our color perception is skewed. In short, the world lit by moonlight is just the same as the world lit by sunlight, except much much much dimmer. In photography, the difference is roughly 17-18 stops, which is massive.

But the light bouncing off of a full moon only provides 1/400,000 th as much light as direct sun. After all, the moon is just reflecting the same sunlight that we see in the day time. In it, he goes into a fair amount of detail on the “Purkinje Effect,” which is an explanation for why our eyes see color and value differently by moonlight. Some time later, I saw a wonderful post by James Gurney on the color of moonlight in paintings and in life. The restoration team brought back the originally intended “day-for-night” look. For whatever reason, prior home video releases had this scene play with standard daytime processing. This footage was meant to go though an alternate chemical process which would underexpose the image and cool the color temperature to give the feel of night. One scene that they discussed was a shot early in the movie which is intended to take place at night, but was filmed in the daytime for budget, safety, and technical reasons. Before the movie, the tape ran a short feature on the restoration process. Though this technique goes back to the very beginning of cinema, I learned about it from a special edition VHS of The Guns of Navarone. It was a movie making trick called “day for night.” But there was something I’d never tried and had always been curious about. While the author was very happy with the painting as it was, the publisher wondered if there was anything I could do? Short of redoing the entire piece, I could not imagine this was fixable in paint.

The black tongue thief book 2