Photoshop tips

Contains help topics such as posting photos to the forum
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novanutcase
Posts: 1814
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:58 am

Photoshop tips

Post by novanutcase »

Did this for a Nova site that I'm on. Hopefully it works for you.

Change Color

Here's a tutorial showing you a few ways to change the color of your car's body. These techniques can also be used to change wheel colors, and tint windows, and can be used in conjunction with some of the other tutorials in this thread.

Lets get started.

First were going to need a nice clear picture of your car.

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Now, before you can start changing the colors around, we need to identify what areas are going to be changed. start by using the Polygonal Lasso tool and making a general selection of the body.

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Here, I selected the body, and left anything completely surrounded by body panels selected. Stuff like the left headlight and left side mirror, I did not select because they're not inside the body's boundaries.

Now, you want to copy the selected area to a new layer.

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Now that you have the selected area on a new layer, we are going to go ahead and Desaturate the layer to show what we have selected and what is not selected. Press Ctrl + Shift + U to desaturate the layer.

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Now that the layer is desaturated, we can go back and start deleting items that are going to remain their original color, like the right headlight, and windshield. Here is a complete list of everything i deleted on the new layer in this picture, to show you what you should look out for. Its good to have a good eye to pick out small details that we dont want to change color.


-Windshield (and windshield wipers)
-Driver's side window and driver's side mirror (kept spoiler on new layer)
-Grille (Pony & Empty area behind pony)
-Lower grille
-Fog lamp holes
-Black area inside side scoop
-Fender emblem
-Door key hole

Ok, now that you have everything deleted that you want to keep their current color, we want to take one quick minute to select one more area now for later. Notice how you can see the spoiler in the window and windshield. I already had left the spoiler in the new layer when deleting the drivers side window, but the part of the spoiler in the windshield was deleted. We want to go back and use the Polygonal Lasso tool to reselect the spoiler in the windshield. Make sure youre on the first layer (the original picture) and copy the slected spoiler to a new layer. We will leave this alone for now and come back to it.

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Now, there are many different ways to change the color of your car. I am going to go through the most common. The first way is to use the Hue/Saturation tool. This is the easiest way to change colors. To do so, you need to go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. The Hue/Saturation menu will pop up and you can adjust your car's color with the Hue setting, and mess with its saturation with the Saturation setting. Make sure you click the Colorize box in the bottom right corner, or your colors will be very limited.

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Another way to change colors, is to use the Color Balance menu. This way is a bit more complicated, but the range of colors you have to choose from are much greater. Go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance and the Color Balance menu will open up. Now you can adjust the sliders to the color you would like, and you can switch between Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights (at the bottom of the window) for even greater control of your colors.

The next way is with the Curves window. The Curves menu isnt ideal for creating colors with hue to them, but rather making black and white colors, like greys, whites, silvers, and blacks. To get to the Curves window, go to Image > Adjustments > Curves. I used the RGB setting, and selected the middle of the graph and dragged down on the line to lower the brightness of the layer.

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If you wanted to do a silver color, silvers have a blueish tint to them, they are not 100% gray. The Curves window is a perfect way to add the blue necessary to make a realistic silver. Just change the RGB drop box to Blue, and raise the line in the graph very slightly and you will start to notice a blue hue appear in the image. Remember though, too much blue will also make for an unrealistic silver too.

Another way would be to select the layer with the desaturated body, and select just the areas that are actually part of the layer. To do so, if you hold the Ctrl button, and click the Thumbnail Image in the Layers Palette for the body layer then you will automatically select all the car's body areas.

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Now you want to make a new layer (layer button is next to the trash can in the Layers Palette). While everything is still selected, use the Brush Tool and select the color you would like and start using a brush to fill the selected areas.

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When you have all the areas filled, you want to start to mess with the blending of the layer. You can change the Opacity to make the layer below appear. I changed the Blending Mode (drop box next to the Opacity slider in the Layers Palette) to Hard Light to make the layer "hug" the layer below.

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I find this method to be the least realistic in this case, but in some cases if you blend the layer correctly and repeat those steps with multiple layers on different blending modes, and even conjoin it with some of the other color changing methods, you can make just about any color look realistic.

Now that the car's body color is changed, we now want to go back to the layer with the spoiler on it, and make that the same color. Select the spoiler's layer, and adjust the color using whatever method above you used to make it match the rest of the car. Since the spoiler is behind the windshield in this picture, I lowered the opacity of the layer so it would appear behind the windshield.

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And you have now finished changing the color of your car.

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[CENTER]Lower Your Car[/CENTER]

First decide on an image, a 3/4 angle works best, but a side shot works also. Front shots wont show you much of anything, so try to avoid them

Start by selecting around the underside of the car's front bumper, wheel wells, side panels/skirts, and rear bumper. You want to start the selection off to the side of the image, and end off the other edge of the image.

When you make your selection, you want to then go around the rest of the image that is above what you just selected. (So that everything below the car's body [wheels included] is not selected).

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Notice how I made sure the selection area doesnt cut off anything in the background, that it makes a nice flush selection. If you chop right through something in the background, it will look funny when you lower the car, because you are lowering the background with the car.

That being said, copy the selected area to a new layer.

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Now, Zoom in on a part of the car at the edge of the area you selected. i like to zoom in on the wheel wells, because this is the most noticable area where your drop occurs.

now with the new layer, hold and drag the layer straight down until the car's height is at its desired location.

Being zoomed in, allows you to lower the car in smaller incriments so you dont always make your car look like its riding on Air Ride suspension.

When I lowered the car in my picture, the front of the side panel was behind the front wheel, and now it is in front of the wheel. We want to fix that, so go ahead and select the area that is sticking out in front of the wheel and delete it.

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Since you lowered the car with the new layer, you exposed some area of the layer below at the top of the image. We dont want to see this, so we will go and use the Crop Tool to crop out that area of the picture. Select everywhere but the area that you want removed with the crop tool, and then hit the Check Mark button to accept the Crop, and the image will remove the unwanted area.

Image

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Alright, there you go, now your car has a nice lowered stance to it, without it looking too low.

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[CENTER]Change Wheels[/CENTER]

Alright! We are going to take the wheels off the black car, and then put them on the blue car and hopefully at the same time achieve an effect of realism.

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First we are going to replace the front wheel. So make a selection around the front wheel of the black car using the ellipse selection tool.
If you don't get the selection right the first time, fear not!
Simply go:
-Selection
-Transform Selection

Drag the edges/corners as necessary.
Press "Enter" when you are done.
TIP: Try and select a little bit of the black tire around the rim, it may help out a little later.

Now go:
"Edit - Copy"
then click on the canvas with the blue car and go:
"Edit - Paste"
Now we have a wheel to work with.

Tools used this step:
Ellipse Marquee

Image

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Since our cars were facing the opposite direction, we'll have to make it so the wheels appear to be going the same way; and here's how:
After you've made your selection, go:
-Edit
-Transform
-Flip Horizontal
This will make the wheel face the right way. Now you'll see the wheel is not the right size and is much bigger than the rim we want to replace. Time for a little resizing . . .

Image

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While you have the layer with the wheel selected, go
"Edit - Transform"
and drag the various points of the box so that your wheel covers up the existing wheel.
See how that extra black around the rim is paying off from a few steps ago?
TIP: Hold down "Shift" while dragging to keep your wheel scaling equally.
(also known as "constraining".

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Now you'll notice that some of your wheel overlaps the front fender of the car. To fix this, simply use the polygon lasso and trace the edge of the fender (its easier to do if you turn off the visibility of the wheel layer).
Then (while the wheel layer is selected and visible) simply press the delete key! Now your wheel doesn't overlap anything that its not supposed to.

Tools used this step:
Poly Lasso

Image

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Now that should ALMOST do it for our front rim conversion. We just need to match the rim's colors/hue/brightness to match the picture we dropped it in. This wheel is pretty close already, but it looks like it could be a little more shiny. So to do that I am going to go:
-Image
-Adjust
-Levels

Then drag the far right arrow to the left a little bit. You'll see the wheel get brighter without distorting it to much unlike what the "Brightness/Contrast" option does.

Image

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We're going to repeat the same steps to swap out the rear wheel. You may have to scale the wheel a little more and do some more transforming (such as rotating and scaling horizontally).
You can see here both black and blue cars with the same rim now.

TIP: I added a hint of blue and cyan to match the setting of the blue car. To do this go:
-Image
-Adjust
-Color Balance

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Ta-Da! We have our blue car sportin' some 18" Racing Hart C5 rims.
(The original rims on the blue car were 17" Konig DTMs if you're wondering)

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John
RodneysPhoto
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Feb 23, 2011 7:26 pm

Post by RodneysPhoto »

great how to John
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TsNStangs
Posts: 1835
Joined: Mon Jul 14, 2008 4:24 pm
Location: SoCal

Post by TsNStangs »

Good stuff, John - thanks again for your contributions here!
~ Daniel
"I'm your huckleberry..."
VTCI #11333
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