Night exteriors were the hardest shots in our lab. Sodium-vapour street lights spit out one narrow orange note; LED retrofits come in greenish; shadows fill with chroma noise. Sodium Night is what we settled on after too many 3 a.m. sessions.

Three lamps

• Sodium: amber practicals against deep teal shadows, the city at night as everyone remembers it
• Mercury: cold cyan-green, harsher and more urban, like old mercury-vapour lamps
• Neon Rain: dense, saturated, wet-street colour for signage and reflections

What's happening underneath

• A print-style contrast curve with a soft shoulder, so practicals bloom instead of clipping
• Shadow saturation pulled back and the toe shaped for clean, dense blacks
• Subtractive density on reds and oranges, so tail lights read deep instead of neon
• Green LED casts rotated toward cyan

Inside: the PowerGrade (.drx) with three stills, a labelled 8-node tree (CST IN › Exposure › Balance › Tone › Colour › Skin › Saturation › CST OUT), and the tone and colour nodes as DaVinci Wide Gamut LUTs.

Pair it with Halide for the full night-on-film look.