Car retouching

[Angel_Ice]

Hi, i'm trying to make this phto retouch.

Anyone can explain me how to retouch correctly this kind of photos? I saw that often professional car retouches clean all shines and relfections from the car and from the windows.

For exemple here, how to remove all that reflections on the right door of the car? It's correct to delete the reflections?

Here is the images:

Original with the desert plate and the pasted car:

http://martintnt.altervista.org/car/jagu2.jpg


...and the one little bit retouched but not finisched:

http://martintnt.altervista.org/car/jagu.jpg

[Daviskw]

Hi there

It just seemed to me the lighting was wrong. So I just darkened some and replaced the sky so the reflection on the car would match and added some tire tracks.

Butch

[Angel_Ice]

You're right! Great, but..how to understand form where comes the light?

How u did the tire tracks?

[Daviskw]

Hi there

You did a good job grounding the car with shadow... I would assume the light should be coming from the left and low or slightly to the rear because the shadows on the people.

I just used a hue/saturation layer for the sky and a warming filter for the overall sundown glow in the sand. Levels and masks for the back of the car.

I am terrible with drawing so I searched the net for tire tracks in the sand.... found lots of examples then I copied, transformed and shadowed.

Butch

[Angel_Ice]

Cool, thanks.

But my first question remain...what if the ambient were different and we musted to change the reflection on the car? how to remove in correct way the old reflections and put on the new one?

I can't find nothing around about professional car retouching....

[Daviskw]

I do believe it all depends on the effect you are looking for. You don't need to have any reflection... or you could use displacement mapping... lots of alternatives. You may want the reflection to appear. It does not need to be true to any object because the object could be out of frame.

Not much help I'm afraid

Butch