AccessPhoto - Everything Photography: Removing reflections

In many instances, to get rid of reflections your only option is to clone them out. This is usually the case, when there is some kind of texture or inconsistencies to the paint (ex. Could be due to noise of the pic or subtle gradients in the paint) However, when the paint seems relatively uniform, but has distracting reflections or shadows you may be able to get away with simply coloring (or for my candian friends colouring ) them away.
Here is one of Tommy's pics...where u can see that the paint is pretty uniform except for that disteacting shadow.



To start, you need to make a selection. I assume you could use a polygonal lasso, but learning how to use the pen tool will save u alot of trouble. Thats an entirely different tutorial tho.
Normally when making ur selections you want to work with the boundaries the pic gives you. In this pic, i started with the big piece of bumper real estate above the lip. Just use common sense to make ur selections; its much easier to break it down into pieces then trying to do it one selection.

1.


After selecting a path, cntrl+click it, to turn it into a usable selection. Create a new layer and choose the eye dropper. Looking at the bumper you can see how it naturally fades from a darker red near the fender, to a brighter red near the nose. Cloning this would be difficult, because the clone tool is not very proficient at fading gradients. Make sure it is on the 5x5 sample and sample a piece of the darker red from inside the right black circle.

2.


Now at the top tool bar choose the airbrush. In the previous picture, you will see two white circles. These white circles represent about how big i want my airbrush to be and where it should be placed. We are trying to achieve the smoothest gradient possible, and the bigger the brush the smoother the gradient. Now with the dark red color, with several strokes fade the red to the other side of the selection. After that do the same exact thing, but with the brighter red selected from inside black circle #2. Work on this as much as yuo want, will u get the gradient how u want it, adjusting opacity and flow of the brush as you see fit.

3.


After deselecting, i think it is pretty apparent that there is a distinguishable line between our selection and the original pic below it. To solve this add a layer mask to layer 1. Im not going to go over how to use a layer mask either becuz once again thats a whole nother tutotial, but basically black erases, and white reveals. Heres a sample of my layer mask. Yours wont actually look like this when your doing it, i just made the mask visible so you can clearly see how i masked it.

4.


Heres what it looks like, once uve masked out the rough edges.

5.


From here on, you just want to do the same procedure for the rest of the selections; making sure each selection has its own layer. This allows you to mask off each selection individually. Just for reference, heres the rest of my selections.

6.


And thats all there is to it. Its a real tedious job, so just make sure u take ur time. Theres no easy way around it. Perfection is in the details!! heres the finished piece after all your hard work.