The Starburst Effect

This is one of my most popular photos among people who've hung my photos in their homes. The "starburst effect" is created by using a relatively small aperture and compensating with the other 2 exposure variables, shutter speed and ISO. For this shot I used a tripod and the night was nearly calm. My aperture was at f/25, ISO 3200, and shutter at 6 seconds.

You'll find that effects like this require some trial and error because of the variations in ambient conditions and in the cameras, of which so many now exist. It's the blades of the aperture that cause the effect and each lens has an aperture made specifically for it.

Balance Colors From All Sources

In photography the adjusting of colors to match reality is called White Balancing based on the original technique of using a pure white or pure gray source to establish real colors in developing software such as Photoshop and Lightroom.

How do you create the correct white balance for 2 competing light sources, like this scene from the 2019 Tax Executives Institute 75th Anniversary meeting?

I do it by separating the elements and adjusting their balance independently before saving the composite as a JPEG. You can also save the layers as a .psd or .tiff file if you plan to do more work on them.

In this case separating the image on the screen behind the ladies wasn't difficult in Photoshop. For more complicated images the selection tools available in Photoshop will make most selections pretty straight forward even if consuming more time.

In both the Photoshop Camera RAW filter and the developing tool I use most, Lightroom, also from Adobe, the white balance tools change the "color temperature" of the image. That's the first thing I'll try but other tools exist in both applications that will allow fine tuning of the element in question so you can match the look of the main image quite well.