Saving your butt with photoshop…

Posted by Jamie Carl on Feb 11, 2010 in Jamie's Blog | 1 comment

 

Now, I’ll be clear from the start that I’m not really one of those “I’ll fix that in Photoshop” types.  In fact most of my automotive work never makes it out of Lightroom2 where I will usually only alter simple things like the tone curve, clarity (for that edgy look I like) and ‘maybe’ do some spot healing to get rid of dust spots from my (currently) uber grubby D700 sensor.

Occasionally though, you just don’t have a choice if you want to get the shot you want…

A couple of weeks ago I finally got to do a photo shoot that I’ve been hanging out to do since I was asked back in December ’09.  The car is Marty Notaras’ absolutely awesome 390awkw Lancer Evolution track car.  This is probably the most awesome car I’ve ever seen in person, let alone photographed.  “Pfft, but it’s just a Lancer”, I hear you say?  Well, let me put it this way.  This thing has been re-skinned in carbon fibre with an aluminium wide-body kit attached to cover the whopping 10.5″ wide tyres and has 20grand of suspension, just in the front and does laps at Wakefield in about 1:05.

Yeah, it’s insane, to put it mildly.

So the reason this took a while to organise was because I had the thought…. “It’s a track car, so let’s shoot it on a race track.  Where is a race track I can use?”  So I traded favours with the nice people at the Southern District Motorsport Association (SDMA) and was granted access to their hill climb track at Sutton.  We had the track all to ourselves and it was set to be a fantastic shoot with heaps of cool motion shots of this awesome race car tearing around the track.

Then the car turns up on a trailer and I’m told that it’s not actually running!  How the hell am I supposed to get shots of the thing zooming around the track if it can’t move under it’s own power?????

 

Easy.

Drag it around behind a Holden Ute and “fix it in Photoshop”.

This is the second most complicated shot I’ve ever had to work on in Photoshop and the first is actually from this shoot now and I’m STILL working on it (might discuss it later).

Seeing as the car couldn’t move on it’s own, we tied it to the back of a Ute that someone had with them and towed the car around the track with me sitting (ie: sliding) in the back tray of the Ute.  Now, to make this look good we needed to go as fast as possible.  This was because anyone who knows how to do motion shots knows that this is the absolute worst angle to be shooting from.  Shooting head on does not give a real good sense of motion as the background usually comes out pretty clear because it’s much further away.  For this reason, I did most of my shooting in the corners where the car would be moving slightly sideways to the Ute.  The problem then was that the corners are when I’m sliding around in the back the most.  I probably took about 200 frames here, just to get 2 photos.

Then into Photoshop we go to get rid of the ugly strap that’s towing the car.  I liked working on this one because I’ve never done anything like this before and I got a chance to improvise.  Sure, people will probably know easier ways or not think it’s special, but for someone who never does this, it’s kinda cool.

The end photo is actually only the one frame with a tiny bit stolen from another photo.  Step 1 was getting rid of the strap that was covering the road.  Easy enough to clone out and took seconds.  Then Step 2 is getting rid of it from the tow hook.  I went for a mixed solution here and cut a section out of another photo that was from a similar angle and placed it over the top with some minor transformation to make it fit nicely.  Then I added a layer mask to remove it all and then masked back in only the parts that I wanted, which was the hook and the eyelid (which had an intercooler pipe behind it).  After a little more cloning it all fit together nicely, but the colour was way off.  So I added an adjustment layer that would affect only the tow hook layer and tweaked the colour to look like the rest of the photo.

And voila!

I think the lesson I learned here is that it doesn’t matter what you do to get the shot, it’s the end result that matters.  I feel sorry for all those ‘purists’ out there that scoff at the use of Photoshop because they’re only limiting themselves and as you have seen, I would not have been able to get this shot without it.  Sometimes, you just need to suck it up and “fix it in photoshop”.

The trick is knowing when to.