hey kojack, thanks for the compliments! No, there would be nothing in the picture to clone off of, and finding another pic with the same car, bare steel and same perspective, lighting etc would be next to impossible. Some things just take going in there and painting it by hand with an airbrush. as for tricks, there arent any, but theres alot of steps and shortcuts i take to save me pulling out my hair and wasting alot of time. For one, I cant stress enough how important the layers and history are. the more layers you use the more control you have. For instance, lets say you dont use layers or very few. and lets say youre working on the layer that the cars paint color is on. now you want to put highlights, reflections on it. if you lay down a light foggy highlight on the top of the fender and you dont like that and want to do it over, you have a lot of work cut out for you. you cant just erase it, because youll erase the cars paint color as well cause theyre on the same layer. now lets say same senario, but you have your history up. you make that highlight, dont like it. now just go into the history and click above the last thing you did before that highlight and it "erases". the reason for the quotes is that its off the page but still there. helpful if you add a tiny touch of detail, not sure if you like it or not, you can go back and forth with the history and turn it on or of, to see if you like it. however the history only remembers like a dozen things at a time, so you are limited on how far back you can go. if youre tapping your airbrush a ton of times to get a light fog or whatever, and dont like any of it, you maybe screwed. thats where layers come into play. for every step, i use a new layer. new layer for body, body painr, tires, shadows, body fill, chop, highlights, sun glares etc. with having both layers and history you can go wild and not be afraid of messing up your pic. say you want to see what it looks like to get rid of the hood ordiment. you use a 100 airbrush strokes (for some odd reason) your history wont erase them all, but you can simply throw out that layer and get a new one. also the beauty of layers is that you can shuffle them around, putting one layer that was ontop of another, now undernieth. you may say so what does that do? plenty. like say you select the body with the polygonal l***o tool, copy/paste. its now on a new layer. you lower it. well when you lower it the shadows of the wheelwells on the tires are now covered by the body. so many photoshop jobs ive seen with no shadow on the tires from the wheelwells. it looks so flat and fake. you need it to add depth and realism. so you add a layer underneith the body and put in shadows on the tires. youre airbrushing under the body layer, so that means you wont get any overspray onto the body, it will be hidden. if you moved that shadow layer to antop of the body layer, youd see the shaddow spill all over the body, depending on where you sprayed the airbrush. anyways, use layers, you cant use enough. my typical sodapop jobs have anywhere from 10-15 layers, i think there is a limit, but ive only reached it a few times with drawings and photo touchups/manipulations. When youre all done, dont flatten it, save it as a photoshop file. then select all, copy+merge, new, ok, paste, save. now you have an image of what you created. merge down the white layer and save as jpg or whatever. i like to name the jpg and ps file the same name, so that they stay together in my files when im looking for them. Hope that helps out a bit! (layers, layers, layers, history!)
Monster...I have just started using layers and you are right....that's the way to go. Before I started using them, I would trap myself and have no way to totally back out of what I'd done...thanks again for jumping in and helping out!!!!!
heres one that you guys may like. I used her exsisting hands and copy pasted them around adding shadows to them. coloring the nails differerntly. I had this on my resume for an example of photo manipulation art, so i dont think its too over the top for here. ( I also added the underwear, so it could of been worse )
One other thing that might help when working with pasting new wheels on a car... If they're at a slightly different angle than the rest of the pic, you can "bend" them a bit in photoshop. Use the l***o tool, draw around the tire (very easy when the tire is on it's own layer, you don't have to be perfect), then right click on the highlighted tire, and select "Free Transform". You'll see a box appear around the tire with little squares on the corners. You can grab those corners and pull on them, to change the shape. Anyhow, right click again, and you'll see options to rotate, skew, scale, etc. The important one is "Distort". With that one, you can grab a corner, and pull, and it will pull only that corner out. So, you can use "skew" and pull down one side to change the percived angle of the tire to match the car, and then use "distort" to tweak it just a bit more to make it match perfect. Hit the "Enter" key on your keyboard to exit out of that mode. It's not a cure-all, but it helps when they almost match, but not quite. It's also helpful for tweaking shapes on chops too. Hope that helps!
Have to confess I'm having trouble with PSP at a most basic level. What's the best way to change the color of something? I've tried different things but it always comes out looking like **** and completely unrealistic.
heres a quick break down on the two ways i do it. 1. use the paolygonal l***o tool to select the door to be painted. 2. go to image/adjust/color balance. you see the window there im using with three sliders. notice the three choices as well. shadows, midtones, highlights. one this i did full red midtone 3. on this i added full blue highlight to show you how it works. see how the red didnt change much, but the highlight on the body lines turned a shade of blue? you can use this to your advantage sometimes. This method is good for slight changes in the color. 4. for drastic changes in the color i desaturate the area first by going to image/adjust/desaturate.
5. next i lighten it so that the color i put down will show through. i go to image/ajust/ brightness-contrast. notice the slider for brightness is over to the right quite a bit and contrast is just moved slowly. play with them to get it right and still see detail. 6. make a new layer, change that layers options to 'multiply' in the dropdown on layers window. pick a color and use the paintbucket and dump it in. if you did it right, you can now 'see thro' the paint. 7. now make a new layer and use a lighter shade of blue, almost white and use the airbrush on a light pressure to make highlights on the body lines 8 finally another layer, this time using while and make the sun glares. done
1. if you dont like the paint after you are done and have it deselected, its ok, because you should of made a new layer for that paint. if so right click on that layer in the layers window and select effects. when it pops up, uncheck apply for shadow (default effect) and go to the bottom of the scrool down menu and choose color fill. 2. choose color fill and check apply box. defualt color i think is bright red. click on the color box to get your color choices, pick your color you want and be happy! remember you can always just come back to that layer and uncheck apply if you dont want that effect on anymore
I can bring up 2 pics ,but only in seperate pages I'd like to have say 2 pics of the same car on 1 page, like a b4 and after,so it is printable in that way or sevearal cars on 1 sheet as in a for sale type of thing. I looked and I have PhotoShop 6 w the 6.5 update also freehand10 and paintshoppro5.5 Started playing with this one from the orig pic of the 39-
to this , way its goin its gonna be LooonG time b4 I get to chopping anything-lol ,BUT I am learning where I was stalled , thanks great post
Here's the challenge....chop this modelA using the clone tool.....it can be done in about 10 seconds....learn the clone tool and life is GREAT. How to start...click on clone tool....pick a point high on the B pillar where you would cut a real car....set your cloning at that point....now pick a low point on the B pillar where you would do the lower cut on a real car.....now left click your mouse and pretend you are spraypainting the car from that lower point upward....this will replace the roof at a lower point....give it a shot and post any questions.
Two of the most under used, but very useful, features of Photoshop are layer masks and paths. Older versions of PS don't have the paths tool, but they will still have layer masks. Layer masks allow you to "erase" (mask) portions of layers, but allow you to easily unmask any previously masked portion. This is much more useful than trying to l***o a portion of a layer, copy it, and paste it onto a new layer only to find that you missed a portion of what you wanted to copy. Paths are also a good way to eliminate the use of the l***o tool. They allow areas you want to select, fill, etc to be easily tweakable. Draw out the initial path and tweak it so it fits whatever you want to outline precisely. Unlike the l***o tool you can start and stop the outlining process many times very easily. The path is also saveable and repeatible - meaning that at any time you can come back and recreate the selection w/o having to retrace whatever you want to select like you would with the l***o tool.
I can see your points chicken, and theyre all good valid ones! I think it comes down to what you learned or what way you were trained and ran with. im so quick now with the l***o and making new layers is such a habit, ive never had to use a mask. However i can see the other way, where youd be very quick at manipulating the points of the mask to tweek it to the shape you wanted. Thats the cool thing about photoshop, you can go about things in a varity of different ways and all are cool, all have their plus and minuses as far as time savers and what-not.
As stated LAYERS ARE THE KEY to doing complex Photoshop alterations. All the other tools are great, but layers unlocks the ability to experiment and use those tools to their fullest. It also allows you to store copies of the image at various stages. Monster, When you want to move a bunch of layers together as a group and keep them registered to one another, LINK them together: In the layers palette, choose one of the layers you want to move, then click the blank square (to the right of the eye symbol) of all the other layers you want to keep in register with the one you are moving. They will all move as one unit as long as they are linked together. Also, If you are doing a very complex image with a LOT of layers (some of mine are over 800 MB with up to 80 layers or more), you can organize/group layers by creating Layer Sets (a folder in the layer palette) and then place all layers that have to do with one item (like a heading) into that folder. Do this by holding down the arrow in the upper right of the layers pallete and the choosing "new layer set" from the drop menu. This creates a folder instead of a new layer. Then drag all the layers you want to combine into that folder.
The Jalopy Journal
