Here's a '37 Willys I shot last night. It seemed to be too pretty to just leave it in the parking lot!
1. Make a selection of the car & one of the windows & save them in the Channels Palette as a Channel mask. (Look at the buttons at the bottom of the Channels Palette).
More about Selections - what I like for objects with hard edges: Selecting areas in PhotoShop
Click the Palette Tab to return to the Layers Palette. 2-click on the Background layer to unlock it. Rename it or go with the default "Layer 0" name.
Recall the main car selection.
Layer> Add Layer Mask> Reveal All
Edit> Fill, with black.
Now the unwanted background should be hidden.
Ctrl + D to remove the selection boundry.
2. Shows the Layer mask. Other layers "Eye's" are off.
Layer Masks - What the Thumbnails mean
Free Layer Mask Tool for Photoshop Elements 6, 7 and 8
The Essential Approach to Masking in Photoshop
(NOTE: You could just drag the background of your choice from another pic in, instead of making the gradient background.)
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.
3. Select a color for the Gradient. I used one from the car.
Layer> New Layer. Drag it below the old Background layer.
Select the Gradient Tool & the Reflected Gradient & drag a diagonal line across the car. Play with it 'till you get it where you want it.
4. I recalled the windows selection from the Channels Palette, Edit> Copied a selection of the gradient layer, & pasted it into a new layer.
It looked to bright to be a background seen through the windows, so Layer> Adjustment Layer> Hue & Saturation & I set the Sat at -50.
Then I added a new layer between the car & the gradient & painted in a black shadow with the brush opacity at 11% to give me more control.
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.
Done, unless you decide to retouch the car. I decided to do a bit, so I made a copy of the car layer & did the retouching on that.
You can see the final result here:
Blown '37 Willys - A Beauty with a Beast!
Have fun with it!
EDIT:
One thing I didn't mention is that an Adjustment Layer (AL) affects ALL layers beneath it. You can avoid that by Grouping (locking) the AL only to the layer below it by Alt-clicking between the AL & the layer below it. You'll see a little down arrow in the AL after you do that. (Not shown here.)
A Group can be unlocked (guess what!) by Alt-clicking between the layers again.
EDIT2: I'm told that this is a Clipping Mask, not a Group.
This is a simplified version of the Layer & Channel Pallets to illustrate using a Layer Mask to hide part of an image. Normally, I would have put the sky image over the P-51 image. Dunno why I did the reverse here.
Mustang & B-17 + PS - Post #26
Doing cars is comparatively easy. Here's some incentive for the bike guys:
http://img.photobucket.com …G_006-02.jpg?t=1277388994
http://img.photobucket.com …_blue_34.jpg?t=1277388561
http://img.photobucket.com …er_ID_36.jpg?t=1277388604
http://img.photobucket.com …e_comp02.jpg?t=1277388651
EDIT3: Mark (lambocars), has a similar tutorial on his site here: CREATING A PHOTO FROM A SHOWROOM SNAPSHOT
More links below.
.
