Thread: Photoshopping to Perfection: Complete walkthrough of this SuperVeloce's transformation

I get asked quite often to do a tutorial or provide some hints/tips with automotive photoshopping. So I took some time today to provide a few details on exactly how I do things. Hope this is helpful to some!

Car: Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce in Bianco Canopus (matte white)

Where: Down town Las Vegas

Gear: Nikon D300S + Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8

How: I usually have pretty good shots straight out of the camera but this was a reject because it required too much work. I then had some free time so I thought I’d show you exactly how I transformed this picture.

1. Cloned out this light stick along with its reflection. Cloning is a word used in photoshopping to describe me grabbing information, in my case parts of the red wall and ‘cloning’ it over the light stick to make the light stick seem to disappear.

2. Cloned out the light pole/speaker along with its reflection

3. Cloned out all the lines on the wall with its reflections

A key rule that most good automotive photographers follow is to make sure they don’t have things ‘growing’ out of the car. They do this because they want to eliminate anything that disrupts the lines and shape of the car. In this case the light stick and lines on the wall, it could also be trees, power lines, etc.

4. I desaturated the body of the car to get rid of the blue tones and to make it look pure white. Desaturating is a term basically meaning your taking out all the color of an element (turning it to black and white)

5. I brought out the reds in the wall. In real life these walls are really bright deep red but because it was getting late in the day it was losing its color

6. A rule of thumb I try to follow is to make sure I can always see tire tread. If you look at a lot of amateur photoshopped pictures they tend to be a little heavy handed on the contrast and most of the time the tire treads are lost which is a sign they went too far.

Lastly I corrected the white balance (overall color of the picture) and I applied a warm photo filter to give the once pure black and white car some subtle color and depth

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to ask

The high res version/complete write up can be seen here

Awesome!

Thank you

Fantastic illustration of workflow! Thank you very much!

Amazing photoshop work! Keep up the good work.

Tire tread, never thought of that. Great point!

Love it man...

PM sent.

Good job, good photo, and excellent way of explaining what you did.

Ronix

Love this. I'd love to do something similar for one of my model session images!!

WOW! GREAT! i learned something. thanks

Originally Posted by BG

Love it man...

PM sent.

I've been swamped with projects/deadlines. Sorry for the delayed response. But hope it helps

Originally Posted by Chris

Love this. I'd love to do something similar for one of my model session images!!

Great idea! I'll do that next