Part 1: Cutting out the car
Get yourself a photograph of a car. Using Photoshop paths we’ll cut out the car, taking it from its original environment — not forgetting to create the 1hole’ under the rear spoiler...
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1 Herers the original photo shot outside. It’s a nice shot, but the brief calls for a studio interior and for the car to look glossy. The first thing we need to do is cut the car out, and this is easily accomplished using Photoshop Paths. Open your scanned photo and trace the outline of the car. |
2 Trace the outside with the Pen tool. Try to get into any nooks and crannies on your photo, such as the bumper details on our example here, but use as few control points as possible. Make use of broken CPs to trace the details. Don’t forget any ‘holes’ such as the space under the rear spoiler — you can create a new sub-path for this or use a new path layer. |
3 Select the outer path (use the Pen tool and hold down the Command key), then click the Load As Selection button at the bottom of the palette. To create the hole, select the spoiler path then Option-click the Load As Selection button. Click the Subtract From Selection option in the dialog that appears, and click OK. |
4 From the Layers tab, and with the selection still active, type Command-C and Command-V in sequence to cut out the car to a new layer. Next, you need to hide the background layer to check the edge, or you could also add a white layer below to help show up any edge problems
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5 The studio backdrop was created in a 3D program rather than in Photoshop. Here a screen grab of the image was used as a rota backdrop, and the camera angle was matched by aligning the grid with the image. This is not an exact science, as we had to guess things like lens focal length (50mm) and camera height, but the match is certainly good enough. |
6 Use any backdrop created in photoshop or simply create a backdrop using blend tool. Use Free Transform to resize the background. |
Part 2: Colour-correcting the car
The immediate problem we’re facing is the colour difference between the car and the background. This is easily fixed with a few clever moves... |
1 This original photo was taken with a colour filter that has tinted the neutral tones, so these need to be restored. Also, the car must reflect the subtle blue of the background. The easiest way to fix this is to use a wash layer.
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2 Sample a blue-grey from the background with the EyeDropper tool. Load the car layer as a selection, and with the selection active fill a new blank layer with this colour. Then just change the layer mode to Hue.
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3 Now the car looks like it belongs with the backdrop. If you duplicate the layer and change the mode to Saturation you have more control over the colour shift and blueness of the car. We set the saturation layer to 30 percent and Hue to 90-100. We also added layer masks to return the headlight colours, as they looked odd being on in a studio.
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