This is a very basic Photoshop tutorial as regards image editing and manipulation. This is not so much about lightning or colors/levels of an existing image and more about manipulating specific parts of an image as in altering, replacing and changing image areas. As an example I'm using my car. App used is Adobe Photoshop CS6.
This approach can be used on any motive (including organic material) but becomes exponentially more complex when applied to organic materials such as bodies and skin especially in closeups. It also depends on detail of the original image and perspective.
That said this approach is very powerful as you can see below. That is the original image I started with:
As a trivia try counting the differences you can spot and see if you can find them all (hint: it's more than 10).
First off to get some symmetry we use the 'image>image rotation>arbitrary' and rotate clockwise by 1 degree. We then select the crop tool on the left and cut off the asymmetric edges that result.
Next up it's always a good idea to apply auto tone, contrast and color by selecting 'image>auto tone, auto contrast, auto color'.
Now we have a nice base and can begin the real nitty gritty. Before though you might notice I got rid of my reflection in the door and the antenna (black dot behind the C-pillar). This is easily done by selecting the part via any of the 'Polygonal Lasso Marquee' or 'Elliptical Selection Marquee' tool...
...and right clicking on your selection. You then go to 'Fill...'
and select 'Content-Aware' in the drop-down menu...
and voila: Antenna is gone...
'Content-Aware' is a super powerful tool and it's efficiency only depends on the feasibility of your selection. There is no general rule, sometimes it's better to cut it tight, sometimes a bigger area works better. In case of the antenna I simply drew a circle selection around the antenna and applied the tool and it worked like a charm.
Wheel Replacement
The biggest difference is obviously the wheels in this example. In order for it to look authentic you need a sample image from which you extract the wheels. In my case I found a car with those wheels on an overcast day (always good for this stuff as there is no high contrast shadow cast by direct sunlight) and took a snapshot:
You only have to remember two things when looking for or taking sample images with parts you're looking to extract/exchange later.
First the perspective has to match, in this case it's a full on profile view. You can ignore left/right but the vanishing point angle and distance has to be roughly the same.
Second you need to have roughly the same point of origin. In this case it is slightly above street level as I'm kneeling down and taking the picture next to the object. You can see me taking the pic on the original shot of my car above (of course I removed myself on the final result).
So once you have the picture you load it into PS and go to the selection tool via the main tool menu on the left and select the elliptical marquee selection tool.
This tool is super useful and you wanna place the cursor on about the center of the circle you'd like to select. Don't worry about exact lineup you can correct that later once it's selected.
Now you press Shft-Alt Left-click and slowly extend the circle outward until you have circled the target area.
You always want to cut it as tight as possible without missing any area you need from your sample. You can always cut and cover extra area later but you cannot substitute image information that you haven't cut out.
Once it's done you can move the cursor into the selection and the cursor will turn into an arrow, with this you can move your selection frame around the image to adjust. Whenever you want to deselect to start over simply press 'Ctrl-D'.
When you're done right-click on your selection and go to 'Layer via copy'. You can cut it as well but it's always useful to leave the original intact.
So here is our selection and we have two copied wheel layers. Now simply select both layers via the layer menu on the right and drag them over to your workspace including the image you want to edit and drop them there.
This will move both layers to your image. Make sure they're on top in the layer menu so they're visible.
At this point you're going to have to decide what parts you'd like to take over. It's always a good idea to leave as much of the original image as possible intact because anything you leave alone will not have to be treated with after effects to fit to the lightning of the scene. So in this case I decided to drop the tires of my 'donor' altogether and simply cut out the wheel itself which I then laid over my image. Set the transparency to sth like 50% in the layer menu on the right and you can easily align the wheel to the tire.
We use right-click to bring up the layer menu and select 'Free Transform' which allows you to scale your layer anyway you see fit. In my case I had to increase the height to make it a full circle until I had it perfectly aligned with the original wheel. If you press 'Shft' before scaling PS will preserve the original ratio and scale symmetrically.
Looks alright :). In the image above the wheels are on one layer but only because I merged them at the end when I was done. Always treat each part of the image separately as there'll always be perspective related imperfections in circles, squares and any other shape. I could have flipped the front wheel horizontally (again via 'Free Transform') but opted to actually use front and rear wheels from my 'donor' to add some variety which is key to authentic looking images so they look like they're real.
Return the layer's transparency to 100% and voila, we just changed wheels without changing wheels :).
If you want to go 101% on details always check for color inaccuracies between your image and your donor image. In this case the color/lightning of the ground surface which you can see through the wheel differs from the ground of where my image is taken as highlighted here:
I opted to leave it as the difference is negligible but make sure to at least spot and decide on those easy to miss details.
Lightning Adjustment
Before moving on you'll most likely have an issue of your transplanted parts looking a bit off which is usually due to lightning/hue/contrast settings. Either merge your layers and edit them or do it separately via image>adjustments>
- contrast/brightness
- levels
- saturation
- color curves
- variations
- etc.
Most these menus are self explanatory and you should play around with them until it works visually. An all important rule in PS is less is more if you think 15% looks right go for 10%, if you think +25% contrast looks fine go for +15%.
In this case I simply had to reduce some brightness and lower the levels a bit to get to the right contrast. I then added some blue and removed some yellow in the colors and it worked very well with the lightning of my image.
Rear Apron Paint
Next up there is an area on the rear apron of my car which is not painted in car color but should be so let's paint it:
First off we select it via our 'Polygonal Lasso Tool' via the main tool menu on the left. This tool allows you to select any area click by click until you join the beginning and end points together to create a selection as done above.
Beware of the small box on top which says 'Feather: 0px' this determines the sharpness of the edges of your selection. If you want to have it blend in later go for anything between 1 and 4 pixels. In this case the sharp edges of the car and paint made it most sensible to use 0px Feather settings.
Once selected copy the seleciton via 'right-click>layer via copy' and then right click on the layer and go to 'blending options'. Now the only thing we want to do here is cover the layer with some color which resembles the car paint. So go to blending options and select 'Color Overlay' and click into the color box on the upper right. You can now use the 'Eyedropper tool' which immediately comes up to click anywhere on your image where you have the color you're looking to get to in the end. Again, no worries about hitting the exact color that can be adjusted later.
As a rule of thumb if you're looking to cover something in color and do not use the 'Replace Color' command it's always good practice to go for a color shade slightly lighter/brighter than the tone you want to achieve.
To get to the final color play around with the color itself and once you're reasonably satisfied click 'ok' and play with the layer transparency setting in the layer menu on the right. Before finalizing it we need to emulate the rough look of the paint on that specific part so we go to 'Filter>Add Noise' and find one that works which we check via the preview window.
Exhaust Pipe
When working on the rear apron I noticed the sad little exhaust pipes of the stock exhaust so I figured I'd juice them up a bit. By now you know what's next. Use the 'Polygonal Lasso' tool to draw a selection around the original pipe, 'layer via copy', 'free transform' and use 'Shft' and 'left-click' to enlarge the selection. Once done hit apply and move the part into a position that works and looks good.
In this case I actually set the 'Feather' to '3px' because it didn't look good with the sharp edges when using 'zero-feather'.
Before moving on I added a blending option and covered the pipe with some black color set to around 30% transparency.
Front Lip
The BMW E30 had the option of a deeper front lip spoiler which my car isn't equipped with at the moment. To create it use the 'Ploygonal Lasso' tool at around 1px 'Feather to draw a selection around the existing lip spoiler, 'layer via copy' and 'free transform' and now asymmetrically simply draw down the lower box line to double the height, apply and relocate accordingly.
Before:
After:
Now we haven't changed the color of this part. The advantage of leaving it as is is that the light reflection of the glossy surface at the corner is maintained when simply rescaling the part with 'Free Transform'. It is however possible to also change the color via a tool called 'Replace Color'. This is something I'll get into in part 2!
Tinted Windows
A cool part of this example is the addition of window tint to the otherwise un-tinted windows of the original. The way this is done is quite simple as we simply select our windows (in this case rear left, right and rear window) and create three separate layers, ideally naming them like that to make separation easier. This can be done via the 'Polygonal Lasso Marquee' tool or any other selection tool you find on the upper right of the main tool menu in PS.
Once you have the selection copied into a new layer you go to 'Blending Options' and select 'Color Overlay':
I wanted to find a color that is realistic and not too dark so I opted for a cyan green and went really dark with color opacity setting at around 80%.
Looks alright but we do have two more windows which aren't tinted which is kind of obvious when looking at the picture. The way to go about it is to take your two remaining window layers and move them on top or your already tinted window. You then apply the same color overlay with the exact same color but increase the opacity of the color:
What we're doing here is simulating the change in light throughput that two tinted windows on top of eachother would have in real life which results in an overall darker tint than just one window. It's a small detail but adds greatly to the authenticity of the result. The same is done for the rear window:
I made a small mistake in my selection of the right rear window but using the 'Free Transform>Scale' tool I simply drag the window away from the B-pillar a bit until there is no visible overlay anymore:
And apply the transformation...so before:
And after:
Wrap Up
Not much more to do here except maybe remove that "VIP Bus Service" logo...
That's right...'select' 'fill' 'content-aware' and done. The final letter 'e' is very close to the windscreen frame and for the tool to work correctly it is very important to only select the letters and not a part of the car or have the selection intersect the letters as that will be regarded as 'content' that will be substituted and result in ugly distortions instead of pure white only.
We started here:
Here then is the final result that I put through some filters to bring out the highlights and colors in some variation:
Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did making it. Join me again in Part 2 where I'll tackle some of the more hardcore editing tools in-depth.
Steem on!
Good work, I havent used photoshop for years and had no idea of content aware fill, looks like a very handy idea,
My son want to learn design, thanks a lot for explanation...
Support him is all I can say! I'm all self taught but have had many a helping hand along the way to guide me and provide useful insights.
Steem on!