VW Vortex Guide to Photoshop...

[1.8t guy]

Can someone show me the boser tutorial......TIA

[Vitti]

Wow !

This topic is very interesting

[ar0ne]

Cartoon Tutorial, By me

[WildcatOne]

Howdy, folks. WildcatOne here, from Houston. This is my first post in VWvortex. I joined on the recommendation of my DragList.com buddy from Nova Scotia who posts in the Golf/Jetta section. Being a Photoshop guy, I was fascinated by turborave's work. Great stuff! Your screen shots, descriptions, method and detail are excellent. I just bought a 90%-restored '70 Bug last weekend...I suppose i could just drive it as it is; all it really needs are some cosmetic improvements here and there, but why not go all the way? I'll be dropping in every day and finding my way around the site...it's superbly constructed and has everything a fool such as I would need to keep my Bug up and running as well as to meet good folks who share the passion. I hope to enjoy many years of fun here; it is a wonderful site. Here is a picture I did in Macromedia FreeHand10, processed through Photoshop a while back of a cloud I saw one morning while driving down to Galveston. Everybody have a great weekend! Cheers, WC1
http://www.glowfoto.com/viewim...=img3

[PhatazzMkIVJetta]

Edit post...started a new one below...Hopefully it will get responded to quicker


Modified by PhatazzMkIVJetta at 3:24 PM 10-31-2007

[happyone]

pretty cars .

[Big_Carp]

nice tutorial. i work full time as a graphic designer, but several years ago this would've been really helpful to me.

[the governor]

I learned a lot watching "you suck at photoshop" #1-#9 on youtube.
link

[jackmcmanus21]

^^^ those vids are great

[Kavanagh]

nice tutorials guys,

check this site out for any more questions

http://digimods.co.uk/tutorials/tutorials.htm

[TokenBlackGuy]

Photo-realistic "Rain Effect", using PS 7.

Open a photo into Photoshop.

To begin, create a new layer (Layer> New> Layer). This new layer is where we will create the rain texture.

With the new layer selected, open the Edit menu and select Fill. In the Fill tool, select 50% Gray from the drop down menu and click OK

Open the Filter> Noise menu and select Add Noise. In the Add Noise tool, leave the default settings, check the Monochromatic option, and click OK

Change blending mode of the new layer to Screen and open the Image> Adjustments menu and select Auto Levels. This will make the speckles more visible to aid us in the next steps.

Open the Filter> Blur menu and select Motion Blur. In the Motion Blur tool, adjust the angle and distance to your preference. The angle will adjust the angle of the falling rain and the distance will affect the length of the rain. In this pic I have my angle set to -76, and distance set to 200. But you can set to your own preferences.

Now we're going to adjust the density of the rain. To do this, open the Levels tool (Ctrl L or Image> Adjustments> Levels). In the Levels tool, drag the left and right "Input level" sliders towards the center. Then, while looking at the image behind the Levels tool, drag the black input slider to adjust the density of the rain until you get the density you prefer. In this picture I have "input levels" at 129, 1.00, and 162.

As you can tell, you have a white glow at the top and bottom of you photo. You can get rid of by a simply "Select All" and then do a "Free Transform". Once that is done just stretch your rain from top to bottom to make your rain even throughout your photo.

Depending little rain you want you can change your "Opaticy". This photo is set to 65% Opaticy to give a realistic rain effect.

The rain may look slightly pixelated so we'll blur it using the Gaussian Blur filter. Open the Filter> Blur menu and select Gaussian Blur. In the Gaussian Blur tool, adjust the radius slightly until the pixelation disappears. This photo's Gaussian radius is set to 0.9.

...and there you have it. The Rain Effect. First tutorial, C+C is always welcome. ENJOY!!!!

[ipodnanoman]

that looks like a lot of work! but worth while...

[benenya]

[VR6'D]

Very helpful..added to favourites.

[carlitoo]

nice guide !

[SANPEDROJETTA]

idk about making a tutorial of this but this is wat i jus made of a car i seen in the fs thread a while back, jus made it look all carbon fiber and added sum angel eyes and yea about it looks cool though im running photoshop cs4
also if u want a bigger resolution so u can use it as a background jus IM me

[orrangearrow]

Howdy everyone, I was wondering how this effect is achieved.

OHH, and Tom Fries car is ****ing awesome, and it looks REEALLLY good on classics.

[a sneaky panda]

do you have an original? it looks just under saturated maybe?

[orrangearrow]

I do not have the original. It looks like some kind of filter was used to crispen up the edges yet alter the colors. It just seems to be a little more animated than real life. here is a better example


Modified by orrangearrow at 1:07 PM 1-5-2010

[orrangearrow]

bump

[a sneaky panda]

after looking at that for a bit iv kinda decided that its not really an effect its what is called a full brush. someone takes a picture and outlines it with the pen tool then recreates the look of the car using the air brush, the paintbrush, the bucket fill tool. alot of smudging and burn/dodge. it takes alot of time and practice most of the time involves a tablet and serious skill head over to http://photoshopchop.com im sure there is something over there to help you

[a sneaky panda]

here is an example of what im talking about

[A Gruesome Time]

Quote, originally posted by the governor »

I learned a lot watching "you suck at photoshop" #1-#9 on youtube. link

Me too, almost everything I know

[Satur9]

Both pictures you posted are HDR created images. The first one being a mild one and the last being on the extreme end.

Photomatix Pro is your friend

Quote, originally posted by orrangearrow »

I do not have the original. It looks like some kind of filter was used to crispen up the edges yet alter the colors. It just seems to be a little more animated than real life. here is a better example Modified by orrangearrow at 1:07 PM 1-5-2010

[crisvr6]

good work !

[Flat Black VW]

Ok, I got the change the hue and saturation to change color but what if I have a specific color I want to use. For example making my silver jetta fire engine red. I have a picture of both.

trying to figure this out also.....

basically if i have a picture of my car, and a picture of the color paint I want, how can I sample one to paint the other???

[atomicalex]

How do you save an animated GIF? My copy of PS is in German - I might have figured it out in english....

edit - nm - figured out the save for web and devices thing.

[strskatr05]

That rain tutorial was absolutely awesome!

[crisvr6]

How do you save an animated GIF? My copy of PS is in German - I might have figured it out in english....

edit - nm - figured out the save for web and devices thing.

to save in german,

go on: Datei

then: Speichern unter (save as)

[darrenston]

whats up i used photo shop to redesign an old school VW beetle and this was the outcome of my work i wish i was at work so i can show you what it looked like in the photo shop folder before but in the end i got a lot of props from my shop for this.

[Syd27]

This is really cool can't wait to try it! How'd you figure out how to do this?

[SGelshawno]

[SGelshawno]

Please go like or subscribe if you like my videos

[discoloredcurrency]

Did this for a local forum, thought I'd add it here:

I have never sat down and documented, step by step, how I photoshop wheel, ride height, and color changes on a car. In this pictorial I will walk you through how I do it.

Though part of my profession includes graphic design, I have never been formally trained. Everything I do is self-taught so if what I show varies from other tutorials or isn't the industry standard way of doing things, I apologize in advance.

Step 1: Chose photos to manipulate.

You are going to want to choose large pictures if you can. The larger the better. That is a good rule of thumb. Small resolution photos have fewer pixels which makes edges more "jagged" and harder to "cut out."

When choosing to add wheels from one photo to another, it is extremely helpful to find wheels at the same, or similar angle. The easiest way to do this is a straight side shot of the car, with the flat face of the wheels.

I have chosen to do one at an angle to show the variations that will have to be made. If I were to have chosen a flat faced shot of a wheel and an angled shot of the car, the wheels will have look flat and fake when manipulated. If you can't find a good angle of the wheels you want, then take a picture of your car at the angle of the wheels. This is much less work .

Photos for Manipulation:






Step 2: Cutting Out the Wheels.



With a mesh wheel, this will be really tedious. With that said, the easiest way to cut out a circle is with the "circle elliptical" tool. Instead of trying to guess where to originate the circle, I apply rulers to the photo.

With the "move tool" selected you can grab the vertical and horizontal rulers and drag them to where you want. Then start your circle until it is around the part you need. This is easier to do on a flat face angle rather than this one. It will not be perfect this way, but it is much quicker than "lasso tooling" the whole circle.



After you select what you need, copy and paste it into a new layer. You can now make the lower layer invisible by deselecting the "eye."



Now comes the tedious part: selecting the parts between the mesh to delete. For this you will use the "polygonal lasso tool." This tool allows you to make anchor points by left clicking. Once you make a shape and connect the last point to the first, it will have a selected area.



To ad more pieces to what you have selected, hold down [shift] when starting the first click of another area. If you select a point that wasn't where you intended or needed, simply hit the backspace key. Once an area is completed, you can not go back a single point. If it is not right, you must "undo" and start over. Proceed until you have selected all the desired area to be deleted.



Now hit delete.



Your wheels are officially cut out. Now paste them into your car photo.



You will use the same wheel for both wheels. The manipulation of the wheel will make it look like different wheels.

Step 3: Blacking out the OG wheels.

The reason for blacking out the OG wheels is you do not want to see them under the new ones. For this, you will use the same technique as selecting the outside of the replacement wheels in the other file.

Move the rulers to the edges of the side and top of the wheel. Use the "circle elliptical tool" to select the area of the OG wheels.

To add the second area, hold down [shift] when dragging the second circle. You do not want to use pure black because it will most-likely stand out as most tires don't appear black in photos because of light reflection on curvature. Use the "eyedropper tool" to select the closest "black" to the area you will be covering. Then use the "paint brush" or "paint bucket" to fill the areas ON A NEW LAYER.





Every time you add something, or manipulate something, you want to do it on a new layer. This way, it can be changed later on if you are not happy with it. If you do this on the background, there is no going back once you have gone too many steps down the road.

Step 5: Scaling, skewing, distorting, perspective, etc. the Wheels.

Now it is time to put the wheels on. If the wheels are the same size at the OG wheels, this will be easy. Just scale or distort or whatever means you like to make the wheels fit directly over the "black" circles. If the wheels are going to be larger than the OG's, do it like this anyway. To get an accurate scaling of the wheels, you can go up the percentage the new wheels are verses the OG ones.

Ex: 17's are 1.134 times larger than 15's, so scale the new manipulated wheel to 113.4% and it will be exactly right. This can only be done AFTER you have finished transforming the wheel to match the OG wheel.

Or you can guess it like I did hahaha.



Rinse and repeat for the rear:



Step 6: Lowering the Car.

This step is pretty easy and will get you the hang of the lasso tool. Start out by selecting a point that is even with the lowest point of the body of the car, outside the edge of the photo. the connect a line to the closest bottom edge of the car and make points all the way around the bottom until you get to the other side of the photo. Select a point outside the photo, then one at the top right, top left, and finally connecting to the first point.

IMPORTANT: when selecting any object, it is important to find the pixeled faded edge of the object. You want to try to make your points right on the faded edge every time, slightly to the inside. The reason is most times outside of the edge of the object is lighter. If you select to much of the light area, it will be apparent the photo has been altered when moved. This principle can be applied to any manipulation of a photo when the lasso tool is involved.



Now, copy the selected area and paste it into a new layer.



Once you move the layer down ([Ctrl] + arrow down) the rear fender will usually cover the rim before the front. To fix this, rotate the image. Move the cross hairs that are in the center to the bottom corner of the section area that is on the front side of the car. no go to the corner by the rear of the car and angle it down by clicking the corner and dragging. Move til your happy with the stance.



Step 7: Adding Shadows.

At this point, you will notice the wheels look flat under the fender of the car. That is because there are no shadows to create depth. Create a new layer and create "shadows" with a black "paint brush." It needs to be fairly large with the "hardness" at 0. Move the layer to under the car layer, and paint on some shadows.



Then lower the opacity until you are happy.



There will also be some issues at the back corners of the fenders where you did not select the fender backing when moving the car down. Create another layer and fill paint in some shadows with a color that matches the closest "black" in that area. Lower the opacity if necessary.

Step 8: Selecting the Paint Area of the Car.

So it's lasso tool time again. Now you will select the paint area of the car. Use the lasso tool and start tracing. Luckily, you have already cut out the bottom of the car so you won't have to do that again. WITH THE CAR LAYER SELECTED, get to tracing. Follow all the areas that are painted, tracing around areas like the windshield, seals, wipers, etc.



In the middle of the area selected are areas that will need to be deselected like the headlights, side windows, etc. Do this by pressing [alt] + left click the first point with the lasso tool on the area that needs to go. Do this each time you start a new area to be deselected.



Copy the car layer and paste it into a new layer. (It should be on top.)



Now make sure it is lined up perfectly with the car layer below. Zoom in a good bit and make the top layer viewable and unviewable by selecting the "eye" on and off again. If it is high, [Ctrl]+arrow down. If left, [Ctrl+arrow right. etc.



Step 9: Changing Colors Effectively.

The best way to change color is not to try to manipulate the existing color, but to desaturate and add a color through "color balance."



This will give you a pure color range to work with.



The color I want is Laguna Seca Blue. There are several ways to adjust the image to get a desired color: Hue, Saturation, Lightness; Color Balance; Selective Color; Levels; and others. I use a combo of the ones listed. This will take practice and is too lengthy to go into. Just play with it.







Step 10: Adjusting final image.

Finally you will want to "copy merge" and paste the entire image into a layer.



What you are doing now is making "level" adjustments to blend the blacks to a common color and give the image more detail.



And you are done!

Before:



After:



There is more to talk about but I am tired of typing. Luckily this background blended with no manipulation. Most times you must either erase the bottom edge of the car layer along the two flat lines going toward the edges of the picture or flatten the layer and use the "patch tool" to blend areas which takes some practice.

But this should get you well on your way to becoming a Photoshop Guru. Sorry I didn't go into more detail and took for granted you know where these tools are but you can search and find them just like I did.

[discoloredcurrency]

Edit: Fixed.