I finally got around to making the video of my processing of the latest Lexus LFA composite! I had photographed one of the two LFA’s at Houston Coffee & Cars in hopes of being able to pull of a rolling composite, and I am very pleased with how it turned out! The process was not easy, and it was very labor intensive, but until I can get a hold of the owner for a proper shoot, this will have to suffice!
Here is the final image:
The toughest part was matching the perspective of the surroundings with the LFA, then correcting the color of the LFA so that it was more believable. Your eyes are very good at spotting a fake, and because of this, composites are exceedingly hard to pull off. After a little bit of distorting and correcting for perspective, it looked as though the LFA was firmly planted on the winding road.
After that, it was time to make lighting effects and changes so that it would look as though the LFA were really there. I created a simple shadow on the ground behind the LFA, to match the ambient light, which appeared to be coming from the top left of the photo. This immediately made it look much more realistic, but also muddled the details of the rear diffuser and right rear wheel. After some quick levels and contrast changes were made and masked off, the details were a bit more clear and believable.
From there, I had to remove the static reflections of people and other things from the LFA’s perfectly white pearl paint. After all, a rolling shot just wouldn’t look right with the reflection of a guy’s face in the fender! A few quick gradients and swipes of the brush later, they were all hidden, along with a “new” licence plate added.
I sourced some rolling LFA wheel shots, and distorted them enough so that they would fit over the static wheels and tires of the original LFA shot. Radial blurring static wheels seems to never turn out convincingly, which is why I opted to go the route I did. I had to desaturate them a bit and tweak the colors to change the cool white balance that the new wheels originally had.
Up to this point, the LFA still had the white balance from the overcast, cool Saturday that Houston Coffee & Cars was held on. This was a glaring difference from the rich, warm tones from the sun-drenched background shot. I used the selective color in Photoshop to tweak the white paint from a bluish tone to a warmer, crisp white. The composite was finally starting to come together!
Next up was the large rear window and side glass. The original image carried distracting reflections and cool colors that did not quite match up with the LFA’s new surroundings, so I applied a new gradient to each piece of glass that matched the new sky. It’s the small details like this that make the image more realistic in the end!
Trying my best to think in real-world terms, I took a step back and looked at the image so far. The Lexus LFA was lit fairly evenly, thanks to the thick layer of clouds that day which created a softbox effect. While this helped me in reducing distracting reflections, I noticed that it also slightly reduced the realism of the image. If the LFA was truly on this road, driving off into a blazing sunset, the front of the car would be very bright, almost blown out, and the rear would be in the shadows. I used the levels mask to create two separate layers, one over-exposed for the front, and one underexposed for the rear. After a little bit of masking, the directional light on the LFA was much more appropriate than before and actually looked like real-world lighting. I followed this up with a layer mask of increased contrast to “pop” out the crisp lines and shadows on the LFA.
I wanted to warm the image even more to match the outrageousness of the Lexus LFA. Simple color adjustments using the Color Balance and Selective Color tools in Photoshop yielded nice results, giving the roadside plants a nice rich red color and the mountains in the foreground a light blue haze.
Pretty much finished from this point, I added a light blue gradient to the sky for a little more visual appeal, then finally added a fake sunset in the upper left-hand corner of the image to give all the light and shadows I’d just made a visual focal point. The nice, yellowish haze brought on by the fake sun added the final nice warm ambiance that I’d been looking for since the beginning. After a little sharpening of the final image, it was all done!
Having continuously tried and failed with full scale composites like these in the past, I was very happy with how this one turned out. The only secret is attention to detail. You have to think of EVERYTHING in real world terms. As I said before, the eye is extremely efficient at spotting things that “just don’t add up”, and the burden of proof is on the artist to find all these small discrepancies and correct them so that, maybe just once, the eye can be fooled.
Below is the video showing the layer-by-layer progression of my 2012 Lexus LFA composite. Make sure to watch it in HD! Thanks for reading!
