Car

[Lofty1967]

Hi Guys,
I want to try and get this car to just have the park in the background (i.e. trees, grass and tree trunks) Is it best for me to make a selection of the car and if so what tool would be best suited or should I just try retouching on copy background layer by cutting and pasting certain parts, if so, what's the best way to do this?
Help appreciated.
Lofty

[unimatrix001]

select the car using maybe the pen tool. place car on own layer and replace the whole background. going to be to hard to figure out where the trunks on the trees begin and there are no trunks to use to fill in.

[mistermonday]

I think you will find it easier and more successful to remove the car and place it on a new background. If you can photograph same location with all those bg distractions gone, that would be the ideal compositing situation. Rather than masking off just the car (which you could do with many tools but especially the Pen tool), my approach would be to take an area around the car to include some bg and the shadows, overlay it on the new bg, add a layer mask and blend it in. You will need to pay special attention to the car's windshield to remove the current objects you see by looking through it.
Regards, Murray

[Tony W]

I agree with unimatrix001 and mistermonday would be better to place the car on a new background. Out of curiosity I did a quck attempt borrowing cutting pasting and cloning. To do a really good job would take a while this way so pen tool and new background may be the way to go

[Lofty1967]

Thanks for all your help guys, can I ask Tony how long it took you to do that as it seems fairly acceptable to me?
Lofty

[Tony W]

Lofty it took probably 30 minutes or so this afternoon during a break. I would suggest my image may look ok'ish if you do not look too closely and of course it helps in this case that the image you posted quite small so I could get away with it. The grass to the rear of the car is poor as are other details i.e. you can see an obvious cloned area in the trees on left.

I am sure with the larger original image you probably have that a better job could be done by spending more time, but it may be more trouble than it is worth and a better result may be achievable by using the pen tool to capture the car and shadow areas and sticking it on a new background

[Lofty1967]

Hi Tony,
Thanks for your reply, really, this is just practice for me to improve my retouching skills as I am a relative beginner. I have attached my work so far this evening. (about 90 minutes worth) Can you advise me on how I 'blend in' the tree to the grass where I am cutting, pasting and moving the image around and they meet each other?
Many thanks
Lofty

[Tony W]

Lofty I do not recall the exact sequence as I did not keep the psd file but what I did was something along the lines of:

• Make a rectangular selection of the trees (red highlight area my pic) including a little of the blue tent top. Edit copy and paste to a new layer.
• Move this area down a little.
• Repeat the paste again to another layer and move this down again.
• Where there is an obvious line around the image overlaps you can remove/soften using a black brush on the layer mask
• Select the 2 new layers and merge. Do not worry at this stage that car is covered a little.
• To reveal the car and grass add a layer mask and paint back the car with black brush. If you make a mistake just paint the area with a white brush to remove.
• Once the car is revealed properly you can concentrate on some cloning to disguise the tree and blue tent top repeats - something that I did not concentrate on in first image
• At the other side I used similar method to copy the grass and also blended using a little overall blur
• Then some cloning of the small details

Hope this of some help

[Lofty1967]

Thanks Tony.