Well, maybe this will help and maybe not, but I can tell you what I ended up doing in order to produce a couple of the night scenes I've done recently (such as my calendar piece this year, where you can see both the "daytime" and night-time" versions). I don't think it produces a "realistic" night scene, but I felt like it produced something that was okay as "stylized night".
As you can see from the calendar piece, I just did all of the colors as normal for day-time. I didn't try to figure out how to shift them more towards bluer or grayer colors in that first pass... although I can see how that would be effective for something that is intended from the start to be "night". Then, to produce the "night" version, I overlaid it with two layers of transparent dark blue (one much lighter than the other). I then used the eraser tool, set on a very low opacity and flow, to slowly take away bits of each of the blue layers, at the points where I wanted cool-toned highlights, until I was satisfied with the contrast level.
As I say, I think the "night" version would be even more effective if the colors I'd originally chosen had been more geared towards the subdued, or to how they would interact with the blue filters. (That was the result of originally not intending to *do* a night version of that scene, and then embarking on the experiment. And that's what drove me to do it that way, with the blue filters, instead of trying to color it as "night" in the first go -- because I wanted that day-time version, in case the night version didn't work out well enough to submit. I thus "had" to figure out a way to adapt the day-time version to look like night.)
I don't know if that helps you, conceptually, or not.