AccessPhoto - Everything Photography: How to salvage a decent photo in Photoshop

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Hey guys, I've been getting some requests for a while now to shed a little insight on my work flow and showing some examples of all the stock photos I used to make an image build, so I'm glad to finally be able to show you guys a shot more in depth and go over the image from start to finish.

Here's the image we will be looking at...




I had seen this red wall by my place and decided since I need to shoot this car quickly before the sun went down that it would be a decent location. I liked the irony of shooting red-on-red and I also figured it would piss a lot of people off, which is also fun So to start out I placed the car where I wanted it and composed the image then took a couple of ambient brackets and a few different lighting setup brackets. Here are the nine images I used to create this shot.




Once I got all the layers in the order I wanted them in and properly masked off the image was looking pretty flat and boring. Here's the result of the nine frames laid on each other.




As you can see the shot was pretty bland, but before tackling that I wanted to smooth out the car and remove any reflections or distractions from the frame. Using various methods (copy/paste, healing, cloning, patch and gradients) I was able to get the image where it needed to be before I started enhancing colors and textures. Here's the smoothed out shot.




Now that I had any visual imperfections out of the way I could start focusing on luminosity and texture. First I did a little dodging and burning to even out the ground before further modification and bring a little texture out of the wall.




Next I went in using different blending modes and adjustment layers to pull as much texture out of the wall and ground as possible. At this point if you compare the image to the original layered shot it's night and day different. I also did some color adjustments to pull the whole red range into CMYK gamut since initially it was way out.




The last adjustments were some minor curves and I also relocated the end of the lower 2X4" that holds the billboard up since I didn't like how it terminated into the taillight. Once more here's the end result.




Just for the hell of it I did decide to do some other edits with the wall in different colors. To do this I made a mask using calculations then I went in and fine tuned it by hand. I then created layers of varying opacities set to color mode and adjusted from there. Let me know which one you guys like the best!

Teal




Light Blue




Black




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