Note

Another view of this terrific looking vehicle.

For many of the shots I took of the cars at the Heavy Rebel Weekender car show, what I really wanted to do was highlight the cars, to let them stand out from the background. Being a car show and not a studio, I had to contend with different backgrounds and of course people coming in and out of the frame.

The technique I used was a simple one actually. First, I selected the outline of the car using various selection tools in Photoshop like the magentic lasso and the quick selection brush. Most of the effort was fine tuning the selection along the edge. I took that selection and pasted it into a new layer on the photo. On the new layer, I then applied a high pass filter on it then used the soft light overlay. This is a popular technique to give sharpness to the image but without the glaring contrasts and fringing you can get from the unsharp filter.

Next I return to the original layer and select some of the foreground if required. Applying a high pass filter on pavement looked really strange so that is why I selected it only after the car was sharpened up. An issue then rises on where to end the selection. On some comments of my photos people have pointed out that the transitions from sharp foreground to blurred background made it too obvious that processing was done. So typically I tried to find such a transition point like a curb to end the selection.

With the car and foreground selected, I then inverse my selection to get the background part of the photograph. To make the background less distinct and provide contrast to the image, I would apply a Gaussian Blur filter, then desaturated the image a bit and darken it. Sometimes I would use the Black & White tool instead of desaturation if the image could look better because of it.

Finally a flatten of the layers is done along with any local touch ups and volia, a photo worthy of presentation.