Today I went through a re-edit of an older shot I had taken for a client back in March. This 2008 Porsche 911 Turbo was a beauty, and I looked forward to getting some great shots of it, and hoepfully a few rig shots as well. When I went out to shoot it, it was a very windy day and the rig shots were not coming out so well due to the constant swaying of the boom. This was really the only shot that came out acceptable from the rig shots, which was a bit disappointing. I had to shoot in the cover of a parking lot so that the building could block the heavy wind and give me a better chance of getting a camera-shake free shot.
This is the original image, SOOC:
(You will notice I was using a DX lens, which got some very noticable distortion and vignetting…I have a 16-35 f4 VR on the way to solve this!)
To keep the rig shot in the same theme as the rest of the set, I edited the shot with a light and airy feel. Still, I wasn’t really blown away by this shot, and felt that the building made the rig shot seem “fake” and less visually interesting. I had meant to re-edit it eventually, but other priorities got in the way until today. This is how the image stood until today, before the re-edit:
Today, I approached the photo with a different mindset. I wanted to change the scenery completely, and give the effect that the Porsche was driving on a wet road, right after the rain. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off when I started, so I just began feeling around, searching through my images for something useful. I came across an old city shot that was taken after the rain and decided that it would be suitable. The scenery wasn’t really important to me since I would be blurring everything – I just wanted nice, lively colors that would streak well and make for a good rig shot.
After that, I searched Google for some pavement textures to add to the ground to make it more realistic. Adding those in and desaturating them quite a bit got the look I was going for. I made sure to lower the opacity so that you could still see the fake “reflections” of the passing scenery in the wet pavement. From that moment it looked as though the Porsche was floating, so I brushed in a bit of darkness so that the Porsche became securely grounded on its new pavement.
From there, I noticed that the windshield still had the reflections from all the trees on it, which definitely wouldn’t work for a nighttime city shot. So I cutout the windshield using the pen tool and added in a simple gradient with a little streak of white to look nice and shiny. Then, I added in a fake reflection by cutting out the car and flipping it upside-down and horizontally. You can find a simlar technique here if you need a bit more explanation. With the reflection in place, it was really starting to look like a wet road…it was all coming together!
To make the Porsche look as though it really was in this new envoronment, I copied the blurred cityscape photo that I’d used for the background and placed it over the car. After distorting and warping it a bit, I lowered the opacity so that it looked like the lights from the scenery on the side were softly reflecting off the Porsche’s deep pearl paint.
To make the Porsche “pop” a little more, I brushed in fake highlights, basically accentuating the natural highlights already found on the car. Just a little bit of work here made the car look great! I also brightened up the side of the car as well since it was a little dark. I burned the wheels and headlights as well to draw out as much detail as possible. I added a gradient on the sky portion to clean up any stray masks or anything else that could look spotty or smudgy. Finally, I “turned on” the foglights and LED running lights with a little lens flare.
You can see a whole video on this process here! No complete walkthrough, but I take the image through layer by layer so you can see it all come together.
And finally, here is the brand spanking new edit!
I’m really happy with how this edit came out, and I feel that it displays the Porsche 100X better than the previous edit. I might go through the existing set and pick out a few favorites to give the same treatment if time allows.
Thanks for reading, guys!