Car Retouching??

[Finn]

I'll put my hat in the ring and vouch for Plantphoto's car retouching video - about two hours long if I remember rightly. I think it was of an Audi. Very thorough and well informed. I got a lot out of it

[gamedonechanged]

Check out the automotive new section on the below link. Some of the best looking car retouch jobs with before shots too.

http://www.curvedigital.co.uk/

[TW0R]

Is it just me or do some of those car ones look like they are sharpened too much.

[wtowle]

It's not you. I'm drawn to the beauty shots and those also are oversharpened.

[garibaldi]

I think your just seeing them appear that way due to the compression of the image

[DragosB]

Hello every body! My name is Dragos and I'm from Romania
Nice topic. I am a car photographer and i found some nice inspiration! This is my website
www.dragosborcanea.com

Can anybody tell me the sharpen technique to get this kind of look http://www.curvedigital.co.uk/ i know there is a lot of doge and burning the how the hell did they get such details.
I tried the high pass filter and others but i never get so sharp and such nice feeling
Thanks!

[garibaldi]

I think for a couple of reasons. One, the images on their site are smaller, and the compression makes thenm look more deatialed, where on your site, they are much larger and scaled, so perhaps you lose soe deatil when you resize for your webite. another thing i noticed with your work was that your blacks are muddy, and that comes from im sure you know, when you are changing the way your layers blend as you work through your stack in photoshop. Its very easy to have that happen when lets ay you have an adjustment layer and blend it as soft light, or over lay, etc, the darks get all bunched up and loose and you get those muddy black areas in the darker regions. Also their work has very sharp highlights, and theyre bright, thats what makes the pop your seeing, and finally, they may be working with files form very expensive cameras i.e medium format for some of the work.

[DragosB]

Thanks for the comment! I need to learn because i don't like my photoshop level. I found some interesting sharpening techniques here which i have to test! Nice Thread which i hope will remain alive !

[santoro80]

Originally Posted by eraanexact

I made a workflow tutorial for car retouching a few years ago, just found it on a backup drive yesterday.
It goes over the rudimentary, nuts-and-bolts stuff like fit and finish and masking/light illustration to remove and simplify environmental reflections. I left off on how to do drop shadows though, so it's not fully complete.

Here is the link:

http://www.box.net/shared/uxej5onnft

It's a 9meg .pdf file, so everyone should be able to see it.

Could you please explain what did you do on the page 15? How did you smooth the reflection on the bumper? I tried it many times, but I still can't figure it out. Does anybody know?

[plantphoto]

I think he's taking a colour sample from 2 areas from the bumper then adding as foreground background colours.You can then use these colours for a graduate to make new bumper.
I often do this to replace panels on cars with reflections I want to remove.
I released a video which covers this technique and others for car retouching on my training site called "Jaguar XK Photoshop Car Photography Tutorial" Compositing A New Environment.
Hope this helps.
Simon

[santoro80]

Thanks. I know he's sampling some colors and somehow painting with brush, but i can't figure out how you paint something like this. He's painting it from sratch with gradient tool? It doesn't look like it.
I cant figure out how he got from the second picture to the third picture.

[plantphoto]

An educated guess I would say it's either built up with ovelaying grads on several layers or very carefully painted & blended.I prefer doing this type of stuff with grads as my painting skills are not that hot!
The lighter tones may be applied in Screen mode,getting the chrome look is what is going to really sell it.
Si

[santoro80]

It doesn't look like he used any blending mode. The tones look same, he just repainted the whole bumber to remove all reflecions and to even out the tones a bit. Its probably really only a brush and mask.

[eraanexact]

Yeah it's just sampling the existing colors and using the airbrush at a low opacity on a new layer to eventually repaint the entire bumper. I like to use seperate layers for each tone and blend them with layer masks. I guess it's kinda hard to explain, but it's pretty simple with some practice.
Also, i'm not sure you can do this easily at all without a tablet for brush sensitivity. If you're trying it with a mouse only, then it would be exceedingly more difficult I'm afraid.

[Isedo]

Hi, I've recenty find this page http://www.carphototutorials.com/pos...otographs.html that explains some nice info.

[santoro80]

Originally Posted by eraanexact

Yeah it's just sampling the existing colors and using the airbrush at a low opacity on a new layer to eventually repaint the entire bumper. I like to use seperate layers for each tone and blend them with layer masks. I guess it's kinda hard to explain, but it's pretty simple with some practice.
Also, i'm not sure you can do this easily at all without a tablet for brush sensitivity. If you're trying it with a mouse only, then it would be exceedingly more difficult I'm afraid.

Thanks for explanation. I think I got it

[ShogunSho]

First of all thanks to luciengordon for bring up this topic that is infact very interesting.

Next thank you to all of you that posted the links of very useful resources.

Now I have new activities to get involved and something new to learn.

Thank you very much

[kav]

That pdf step by step was excellent. I imagine it would be tough to get every last detail down in a program like maya for print standards, where motion doesn't hide anything, even with the insane amount of polygons that go into car models. It just seems far quicker doing detailing in photoshop, and easier to gauge given that you're viewing rasterized data. Any of you guys that have worked on cars know how someone with a decent background in retouching overall would go about building up portfolio material for cars? I mean where do you start out for an area like that? Obtaining good raw material is a bit more difficult there than in other areas of retouching.