Adam Sund Photo Blog Photography is the new black.

Photoshop Challenge

My dear colleague Frank Visler poked me on facebook and said, go edit this photo. Having respect for the elderly, I of course obliged.

In this post, I will demonstrate how I managed to make a blown out photo of some nice looking cars look a bit more dramatic.

This is the original unedited photo taken by Martin Wennerstrøm

And here's what came out of photoshop 20 minutes later.

This is not by any means a full makeover - that would take a bit more than 20 minutes. This challenge was to make the image look more dramatic through fast editing and with some easy tricks to do so.

Let me guide you through it.

Here we have the image opened in Photoshop.

To me, the challenge was to make due with a pretty cool image which unfortunately had burned out areas.

- My first layer was a curves layer, which pretty much was used to pull out whatever information I could in the brightest areas.

- Next, i made a copy of the original layer, added motion blur (vertically), masked it, and painted back the effect on the wheels. We don't want to see the prints off the wheels if we are to create the illusion of a burn out.

I had my hazzle with the rims. I made selections of the 3 visible ones (I left out the top left one) and tried to add some blur effects to them. But because of the crooked angle, non of the blur effects was really suited.

- What I then did was to take the smudge tool and smudge away within the selection of the largest rim. I figured the other ones would be too covered in smoke. Yes, Smoke.

- In order to create the illusion of smoke, I usually create several layers, take a brush with low flow (4-5%) and paint in different shades of grey and white. That way, I can add this smoky effect. I didn't work the first few times, but if you keep trying, you'll most likely end up with something that works - it's all about creating the illusion.

- Here, I added a sky to add drama (I guess that's my thing). What I also did was make a new layer, take a white brush with flow of 10-15% and repeatedly dab white areas around the lady.

- After that, I added a color balance layer where I adjusted the mid tones and dark tones to get the bluish feel.

- on top of that, I added a PWL layer (paint with light - empty layer set to overlay) and painted with black and white (5% flow) to add highlights and drama to other areas. I also used this to add the skidmarks on the ground under the wheels. This basically works the same way as dodge and burn.

Finally, I merged all the layers together on top of it all (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E), dublicated (CTRl+J) and changed the top layer to vivid light.

I then inverted it and added surface blur (30 ish in both values). Again, I do the CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E thingy to merge to top. Delete the second layer still in vivid light mode and change top layer to overlay. I add a layermask to paint where i want this effect.

If the last section made no freaking sense at all, just use highpass. But by doing it the way described above, you avoid the nasty looking halos one always end up with after using highpass to sharpen up the image.

Feel free to throw Photoshop challenges at me from time to time.