Something I did in photoshop actually worked! (ish)

[Chris71]

I'm begining to realise that whilst PS requires skill (rather mroe than I currently have!) it doesn't actually need black magic. I sort of managed a couple of things I'd wanted to do for a while last night.

The first was adding motion blur. I borrowed this image off the net (strictly for my own experiments etc.)



I used a combination of lasso and magic wand to select all the parts of the car and then saved the selection. I created a seperate layer which I applied the motion blur to, then I created a layer mask, loaded the car selection and filled it with black, which brought the car back into the picture. I then copied the wheels into a seperate document one by one using a rectangular selection (trying to just capture the spokes and not the wheel arch). I applied a radial blur to each and pasted them back in.

The results may look a little crude to PS experts, but I was quite impressed that you could do this in 5 minutes:



The main issues are ghosting around the car and a rather cut'n'pasted look to the wheels. In theory the former should be easily sorted - fill the space left by the car with something like the surrounding landscape before you blur it. In reality, the clone stamp tool wouldn't ever let me do that - it would clone onto other areas of the image, but not the car. I presume this is due to the layer mask? The wheels I wasn't quite so sure about - it wouldn't let me apply a radial blur to an irregular shape and as far as I'm aware there is no circular/elipticle selection tool.

Next up was a second go at applying a graduated filter. Once again, it was surprisingly easy to get an approximate result. Following the tutorial suggested by Dean in the previous thread, I cloned the background layer, used the gradient fill tool to draw a line vertically down the cloned layer and fill it with the graduated colour, then merged the two levels into eachother and played with the opacity. From a rather washed out sky, I got this...



That was a very bland shot before (one of mine!) but I reckon it now looks quite reasonable.

I know none of the above is news to anyone who actually knows how to use Photoshop, but they're an acheivment for me.

edit: Found something on my work PC that would crop the Piper GTR shot.

Edited by Chris71 on Thursday 27th March 10:11

[andynoquantum]

I like what you've done with the filter. Might go back through some of mine later and have a go too.

[AndyKH]

Try using the pen tool to create a clipping path rather than the lasso tool, otherwise ok for a beginer. Keep at it and the possibilities are endless.
This 'was' an astra.

[Chris71]

AndyKH said:

Try using the pen tool to create a clipping path rather than the lasso tool, otherwise ok for a beginer. Keep at it and the possibilities are endless.

All the tutorials I've seen recommend using the pen tool too - I don't doubt there's a reason for this, but what is it? If you have a shape with a fairly obvious silhouette, the magic wand seems to be pretty accurate compared to trying to draw it freehand with the mouse? Is there a trick to it?

I agree it's pretty rough, but I was hoping to pick up some alternative techniques - particularly to do with the ghosting and the radial blur.

[Neek]

This looks a bit rushed to me - take your time - it is worth it!

try and get a higher resolution photo aswell....

how about this to try on:
http://s2.desktopmachine.com/pics/Ferrarri_F430_20...

I would recomend using a less sharp line - feather of about 3-10pt should help

The way I do motion blur is to do a layer and get rid of the car and wheels, use the motion blur filter then do the rest, then you won't get a ghosting effect.....

hope this helps

George

[AndyKH]

The pen tool allows you to create a path around objects with curved edges so you dont get and square edges on round objects, you then turn this path into a selection and adjust the selected area. Oh and the marquee tool can be turned to round instead of square for wheels, once you have the selection go to selection, the transform selection and that gives you the freedom to adjust the selection, Hope that made sense.

[VxDuncan]

Used to be (though haven't done it for a while) that PS wouldn't allow you to set the centre of the radial blur, it was always centre of the image, regardless of the selection. In this case I used to copy the wheel to a new image (using crop and rulers to ensure centre of image is centre of wheel) and the blur, then paste back. May have been fixed in CS though, this was a few years back.