Photoshop Tutorial I - Lowering and Changing Wheels

[levymetal]

Due to the high success and rate of requests in the Photoshop thread (and now that it has it's own subforum), I thought that perhaps people would like to learn how to Photoshop their own cars. It's fun and easy once you know how to do it, so I'm going take the opportunity to share my knowledge and teach everyone the methods I use when I do my Photoshops.

Before we get started, I'll go over a few things about the software required. I'm using Photoshop CS3 in this tutorial. However, the methods I use can be applied to any photo editing suite, even gimp will work fine if you don't want to pay for software. You'll just have to find out where the tools are that I'm using

The first thing to do is find a nice, good quality picture that you want to manipulate. Most of you will be doing your own cars, so if all you have are small blurry photos, go outside and take some more! It's much easier to work on a decent photo. For this tutorial, I am going to chop a WM Caprice.



So, first thing's first, open it up in Photoshop. Now, what we want to be able to do is adjust the height of the car on the image. To do this, we will create a new layer which only has the body of the car and everything above it. There's no easy way of explaining what I want to do - so I'll just show you.

In the layers panel, right click on the background layer and click "Duplicate Layer". In the dialogue window that pops up, you can name the new layer anything. When you start mucking around with lots of layers it does become useful to name them appropriately, so in this example I have called it car_body.





The image itself shouldn't have changed - yet. What I want you to do now is hide the background layer by clicking the little eye next to it. Then ensure that the car_body layer is selected (the selected layer is highlighted in blue). Layers panel should now look like this.



Now it's time to cut out the body . There are so many ways to do this, you can use a selection tool called magnetic lasso to automatically find the lines - but honestly, I still find using a plain old eraser the easiest way to provide the best results. The magnetic lasso only really works well on lines which have high contrast. So select the eraser tool from the tool palette. Right click anywhere on the image, and set the hardness to 98%. I find that this provides a good edge which has the perfect amount of harshness (100% is just too harsh). Set the size of the brush to whatever you feel comfortable with with the size of image you are editing. You'll end up changing the size of the brush to get into hard to reach places anyway.





Don't worry about getting it too perfect - we'll touch it up later with the background unhidden so we can see where the defects are. If you have a problem using the eraser, just use magnetic lasso instead . For me it takes about 3 - 5 minutes to use the eraser to achieve something like this.



Now, unhide the background layer by clicking the little eye again. Make sure that the car_body layer is still selected, and select the move tool from the tools palette. Now press the down arrow on your keyboard until you are happy with the ride height.





Whoops! Look at all those defects near the rear wheel. Get your eraser out and fix them up. Just have a play until it looks right. You may have noticed at the top of screen you have duplicated sky etc because you've moved the image down. Easiest way to resolve this is to use the crop tool to cut it out. Crop tool is shown below.



And the final result of lowering should look something like this.



Now to do the wheels. The best results are achieved when you can find a photo of a car with the wheels you want on the exact same angle as your car. In our case, I will be using the following photo.



Open it up in Photoshop, and roughly cut out the wheels. Doesn't matter if it's not perfect - again we'll edit it on the image later on to get it looking good. If the image is facing the other side of the car as mine was, flip the image horizontally as shown here.



If you're aiming for realism, you should cut out both the front and rear wheels individually. You can use the same photo of a wheel for both the front and the rear - but it'll never look real because you'll be squashing a photo taken on the wrong angle. In this case I am aiming for a realistic look, so I will use both the front and rear wheels individually from my donor image.

Using the selection tools, cut out 1 wheel and press CTRL + C to copy it. Now go into your lowered cars window, and press CTRL + V to paste the wheel onto a new layer. You can double click the layer to rename it, so do this for both the front wheel and the rear wheel. Position the layers as so.



Now click on the wheel layer you want to modify and press CTRL + T to open up the free transform tool. Move the wheel into the correct position, and rotate and resize it until it looks good. Do this for both the front and rear wheels.



Now get your eraser out and erase all the crap until it looks good. Click file > save for web and devices, select JPEG, and set the quality to 60-80. When you're done, you should have something like this.



Overall I am pretty happy with the result. Took maybe 10-15 minutes to complete and although there are some small defects they are hardly noticeable.

So that concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions or get stuck anywhere just post your questions up and someone will be able to help you out. Also post any suggestions / ideas you may have about the process. Don't be afraid to have a bit of a play with all the features in Photoshop as well to figure out what they do

Peace Rabbits

[Bobski]

Yeah that's a nice feathered way of doing it. I use the pen tool from time to time aswell. Depends how I feel.. Only thing is shading the front guard and small things like that which make it look legit. Nice tutorial though

[madnuts]

can u show how to shave off door handles and the black strips up the side

[levymetal]

No pretty please with a cherry on top?

Open up the image you want to shave and select the lasso tool.


Now create a selection on the image roughly the size of the door handle.


Now press CTRL + C then CTRL + V to paste it onto a new layer. Select the move tool


And move the new layer over the door handle.


Now touch it up using the eraser and blur tool.


You can also play around with the adjustments (I only had to change the brightness) to get it perfect. These can be found in the Image > Adjustments menu.

Final product.


You could also use clone stamp, but it's just as easy doing it this way

[VS6]

thanks for helping me to do this >>

[danja]

Nice tutorial, times like this I wish we still had a rep system.

Next one should be how to shop Trent from Punchy into the drivers seat

[madnuts]

No pretty please with a cherry on top?

Open up the image you want to shave and select the lasso tool.


Now create a selection on the image roughly the size of the door handle.


Now press CTRL + C then CTRL + V to paste it onto a new layer. Select the move tool


And move the new layer over the door handle.


Now touch it up using the eraser and blur tool.


You can also play around with the adjustments (I only had to change the brightness) to get it perfect. These can be found in the Image > Adjustments menu.

Final product.


You could also use clone stamp, but it's just as easy doing it this way

pretty please lol thanx for that

[Bobski]

Nice tutorial, times like this I wish we still had a rep system.

Next one should be how to shop Trent from Punchy into the drivers seat

Max doughies

[Trayner]

this tread is a good idea, then some ppl can do there own lol

[Maxxiz]

Great write up mate.

[Paul_grima]

Thanks alot for this

[HoldrodeoLT]

Ok question on wheels... How do you guys change the angle of a wheel when the original picture your looking straight at it? I think it's got somethign to do with free transform.. But i havent got it to work out for me yet, its just ends up looking like a squashed version of the original straight angle?

[Trayner]

Ok question on wheels... How do you guys change the angle of a wheel when the original picture your looking straight at it? I think it's got somethign to do with free transform.. But i havent got it to work out for me yet, its just ends up looking like a squashed version of the original straight angle?

EDIT>TRANSFORM and use the perspective and warp tools

[levymetal]

How do you guys change the angle of a wheel when the original picture your looking straight at it?

The short answer is you can't. I find the easiest way of explaining things is to look at it in extremes. If I took a photo of the back of a car, how could I rotate that photo to view the side of the car? I couldn't. Because the information isn't there. Just like trying to change the angle of a wheel - the information isn't there so the best you can do is squash it. That's why I pointed out in my tutorial that you should try and find photos of the wheels on the exact same angle as the photo of your car. And you should also chop out the front and rear wheels individually, because they will be on different angles. The more you have to 'squash' a wheel to get it to fit properly, the worse it is going to look.

[HoldrodeoLT]

The short answer is you can't. I find the easiest way of explaining things is to look at it in extremes. If I took a photo of the back of a car, how could I rotate that photo to view the side of the car? I couldn't. Because the information isn't there. Just like trying to change the angle of a wheel - the information isn't there so the best you can do is squash it. That's why I pointed out in my tutorial that you should try and find photos of the wheels on the exact same angle as the photo of your car. And you should also chop out the front and rear wheels individually, because they will be on different angles. The more you have to 'squash' a wheel to get it to fit properly, the worse it is going to look.

ah ok then, and do you just use google images for finding diffrent angles of wheels/car body's? or somthign else? Photobuket?

[Reaper]

Best Tutorial ever!

Can you do one on how to change the color of a car (but keep the right shading etc)?

Reaper

[BXHD]

wow, this is a really goo tutorial.. the caprice looks tuff now

[levymetal]

ah ok then, and do you just use google images for finding diffrent angles of wheels/car body's? or somthign else? Photobuket?

Yeah I just go google images, or browse the rides section. Generally I only like Holden wheels, so if I knew I wanted VE Clubsport wheels then I'd just search google images for VE Clubsport to find some good reference photos.

Can you do one on how to change the color of a car (but keep the right shading etc)?

Will get on to it . There are a few different methods, depends on the colour of the car really. The easy ones are the cars that don't blend in with the background (red, green etc). Silver and black and colours that are similar to the background are a bit harder

[holdendude]

Hopfully this will take some of the load of us photochoppers! Right rch & levy? good write up man! +1

[Trayner]

Hopfully this will take some of the load of us photochoppers! Right rch & levy? good write up man! +1

haha and me ? , but sadly i dont have time to be a photochopper as much as i used to

[hwy747]

Thanks heaps dude. I have been trying to figure out how to do this for ages!!

[rch-13z]

Great write up levy, Two thumbs up!

[Maxxiz]

Yeah a colourchange tutorial would be amazing!

[Escape-The-Fate]

i can get to the bit when you move the layer down but dont know how u get the layers to merge/join so u can see the wheels sitting in the guards i only got original image and the image i erased the wheels and road..? using gimp

[Rolla_Rolla']

Next tutorial isss ?