How to virtually tune a car using Adobe Photoshop

Hello Everyone! Today’s post will going to be a lilttle bit different than the ones I’ve created. So far we’ve been building something from scratch. In this tutorial, however, we’re going to take a photo of a car and learn the basic techniques of Photoshop Virtual Tuning (PSVT if it tells you something). Now why is this important or how should it be to your advantage? Well, there are a couple of websites that make virtual tuning contests. Also, if you love cars, and you love car tuning, you can easily create the ride of your dreams. Plus, the techniques shown in this tutorial can be to your advantage later if you have to do similar things in Photoshop. So, let’s have some fun with Photoshop Virtual Tuning.

Okay, so if you decide to jump in to virtual tuning, you have and endless set of options of what you can create. You can work studio photos or you can grab an image that was shot in nature. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll choose an image of a 2005 Ford Mustang GT from netcarshow.com. Click on the picture below for full size!

Open up this imgae in Photoshop. So, what can we do with an image of a car to make it much cooler? Well, we can do a whole lot of things, honestly. We can lower the ride height, change the rims, remove some unneeded body parts, color the lights, change the mufflers, darken the windshields, change the color of the whole car of just some parts, carbonize or some body parts, we can even put vinyls or graphics on the car. We’ll cover some of these in this tutorial. However, there are more hardcore stuff you can do to a car, like widening the body kit or using airbrush to create a custom paintjob, or you can even draw new body parts such as air inlets. These are pretty extreme stuff, if you like PSVT, you may look up for them on the Internet.

Painting the Car

The first thing we can do with our car is to paint it. We have different options to choose from here. We can either choose Color Range from the Select menu and play with the given options there to get a selection we want. But sometimes, this approach just doesn’t work. In our case, it’s best to use the Pen Tool (P) and create a path around the car, and then exclude some parts for us to be able to paint it.

Note: You can make all selections with other tools than the Pen Tool (P), but plesae keep in mind that if you do use the Pen Tool, you’re creating Paths, which we can later reuse (and we will!). So, I greatly encourage you to use the Pen Tool to make the selections in this tutorial.

So grab your Pen Tool (P) and draw a path around the bodywork. Make sure you include mufflers, outer mirrors and spoilers, but you should exclude the wheels, we don’t need them for this selection. Here’s some hint to better understand.

Once you’re done with the selection, let’s open up the Paths panel by going up to the Window menu and choosing Paths. You can see you have a Work Path. We have to save this path by renaming it; double-click the path’s name and type in Bodywork. Now, with the Pen Tool (P) selected, right-click inside the path on the canvas, and choose Make selection. Set 0px feather and hit OK. Now you have the full bodywork selected, so press Ctrl+C then Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+C and Cmd+Shift+V on the Mac) to copy and paste in place into a new layer. It’s cool but what now? Well, now we have to erase some parts of this layer. For example the taillights, the prisms, the mufflers, the license plate and the windshields.

To do so, grab the Pen Tool (P) again, and select around these listed parts of the car. Then right-click inside and choose Make selection, hit OK, then simply press the Delete key to cut this portion out of the layer.

Here are the parts you have to exclude.

Or this image might tell you more about what to select exactly.

When done with one path, make sure you save that path in the Paths panel! Later, when you have all paths done and saved, you’ll just have to Ctrl+Shift+Click (Cmd+Shift+Click on the Mac) on each of their tumbnails to select them into one.

Accodring to the note above, when all those little body parts are selected, click on the Bodywork layer in the Layers panel, and copy&paste-in-place the selection into a new layer. Now you have a layer that contains all these little body parts that we don’t want to get painted. I named this “Small parts not painted”, you may do so similarly.

All we need to do now is to hit Ctrl+U (Cmd+U for Mac users) and adjust the Hue slider to create the new paint job for our car. You can also crank up the Saturation a but if your color seems dull. I used -165 for Hue, and +30 for Saturation.

Now our car has been painted! One last thing to do to make things pretty: our image has got pretty much pixelated. Adjusting the Hue slider can make such things happen. Not to worry for a second though, help is at hand! Select the Bodywork layer, go up to the Filter menu, choose Noise, and Reduce Noise. Set these values here.

And voilá. See the difference when pressing Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) a couple of times? Here is my blue Mustang.

 

Lowering the Bodywork

Okay, now we have painted our car to a custom color. Next, let’s lower the bodywork of the car. For this we’ll use our existing path around the car. We named it Bodywork, so find that path, and Ctrl+click its thumbnail to select it. Now we need to extend this selection, which is a bit complicated, but you’ll see why it’s good in the end.

First, create a new horizontal guide to 616px. It’s easy to do, just select View -> New Guide. Then, grab the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L), and create a selection around the whole image, above this guide. But do NOT touch the wheelbase and the wheel itself. Here is what we are trying to achieve.

Filled with yellow is the area that we want to select, on the picture below.

Now that it is selected, we need to merge everything we can see. For this, make all layers visible, and click on the topmost layer, then hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E (on the Mac, this is Cmd+Option+Shift+E). This should create a new layer above all our previous layers. Now, let’s quickly Copy&Paste-in-place it to a new layer. When it’s done, grab the Move Tool (V), and nudge the bodywork layer downwards a little.

You can press the Shift+Downarrow key three times for optimal results.

Now we can see that the front part is a little lower than the back part, so we can hit Ctrl+T (that is Cmd+T on the Mac) and rotate it just as little as -2°s.

Two things are remaining from this section. One is to remove the unneeded stuff, and two is to make it look believable.

So we need to corrent some parts of the image that became weird by moving and transforming the bodywork. Let’s first focus our attention to the front bumper. We need to erase the unneeded part of it. So with the Eraser Tool (E), make your moves. Be sure that the topmost layer is selected.

Let’s take a quick look at the top portion of our image. It looks awful because of the rotation we made. We need to manipulate our layers a little.

Currently my layer stack looks like this.

The top two layers are important only. I have the merged layer, and the cutout (and tilted) layer on top of it. Let’s duplicate the tilted top layer, Ctrl+J on Windows, Cmd+J on the Mac. Next, select the merged layer and the cutout layer above it. So we have two layers selected, and there is the duplicated cutout layer on top of them. Press Ctrl+E or Cmd+E to merge these two layers into one. Select this new layer, and ame it “Merged”. Uncheck the eye icon on the upper cutout layer.

Why were all these needed? We want to preserve the rotated bodywork layer because soon we’ll play with rims and shadows, for which it will be a great help if we kept it.

Let’s grab the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L), and draw a triangle on the top of the image. Then, switch over to the Patch Tool (J), and patch this selected area.

You might need to repacth some areas a couple of times to get perfect results.

In the top left corner, I get a glyph, which can be easily corrected using the Clone Stamp Tool (S). And finally, the result speaks for itself.

 

Custom Rims

Probably the msot interesting part is coming up, in which we’ll add new rims to our Mustang. For this purpose, we need a donor image. After searching for ages, I found a good example of a donor car, and that is the Hamann BMW M6. Image courtesy of netcarshow.com. Click on the image again, for full-size preview.

Open up this image in Photoshop. You can even import it into the current document if you wish. Our job is simple here. rab the Pen Tool (P), select both rims, and copy-paste them into our Mustang image. So with that in hand, let’s do it to it!

If you’ve finished selecting a rim, make a selection of it, and then Copy&Paste it onto the Mustang image. One more to go!

And here are our rims cut out and ready to get transformed into their appropriate positions.

So we’ll have to posititon each of them one-by-one. Start by lowering the new rims’ opacity to about 50% so you can see through them. Then position them so that the center points of the old and new rims match. Then hit Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on the Mac) and first rotate them accordingly.

My Options Bar for the back wheels looked like this before committing the changes.

And these are my vaules for the front wheels before hitting NumEnter.

These values are here for reference only. I encourage you to try out these tools yourself and get your own results which may be even better than mine. Be sure to set the Opacity values back to 100% when you’re done!

And this is it! The rims are almost done, just one thing remains. Since the front wheels are turned, some of the wheels are covered by the bodywork. So let’s correct this by adding shadow. And this is the point where our patience and work pays us back. Remember that hidden top layer there? Turn his visibility on right now. Nothing happens right now, only you can see that tilted top edge again. Grab the Eraser Tool (E) and remove it nice and smooth.

So, back to our shadows, select the Wheels layer (I actually merged them a minute ago), and grab a big, black (#000000) brush with 0% hardness and reduced opacity (about 15-20%), and paint the top left portion of the front wheel. Go over it 2 or 3 times till you get the result you want. See the brilliance? Repeat this step on the rear wheels, too!

While we are here at shadowing, stay on this Rims layer, and make the shadows stronger below the car, after all, it’s now a lot closer to the ground. Again, some smartness helpus out big time, we’ve preserved the bodywork layer, so it covers the layer below (the one we are painting on) very nicely. Make 3 or 4 passes, just like this.

And when done shadowing the underbody, press Ctrl+L to bring up the Levels window, and increase the contrast a little on the wheels. I used 20, 1.00 and 240 for the values. They’ll now look incredibly cool!

Beautiful! Just one last thing in this chapter that we’ve missed (I, actually) is there is a little glyph just before the rear wheel on the bodywork. Zoom in to see that.

There is the little ratty! Quickly grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and while the topmost bodywork layer selected, draw a selection around this part of the image. Like this.

Now Copy&Paste-in-place, then Ctrl+T (Cmd+T), right-click, and choose Warp. We want to warp the bottom left part of the layer inside a little, towards the wheels to make that glyph disappear. My result is this.

 

Tail Lights

We area doing extremely great so far! Let’s look at the tail lights, how we can improve their look? Well, I’m a big fan of black&white lights, so why don’t we explore a way how we can create such?

First of all, we need to grab the Pen Tool (P), and… no, we don’t need the Pen Tool! We need our existing paths! Quickly bring up the Paths panel, and check if there is a path for the tail lights. I happen to have them (of course I have them), so I just have to Ctrl+(Shift+)Click on them.

Now this way we can’t properly select them, because we have moved away and rotated their layers, but what we can do is click on the Background layer (you have it, don’t you?) and here is where we have to press Ctrl+C / Cmd+C. Then, remember, we rotated our bodywork -2°’s, so create a new layer on top of all, and Paste-in-place here. Then, hit Ctrl+T, and rotate the lights by -2°s. Finally, nudge the light into their correct positions with the Move Tool (V).

Now we got them in their appropriate position, let’s actually start working on them. Well, it’s not going to be long, just press Ctrl+Shift+U or Cmd+Shift+U to desaturate the lights, and bring up the Levels adjustment window, and add some contrast to them. I used 50, 1.00 and 210 for the values.

 

Removing some randomness

We’ve created some very interesting so far, let’s now remove some parts from the car. For this, we’ll use retouching tools such as the Patch Tool (J) or the Clone Tamp Tool (S). Here are our options on what we can remove.

The rear prism,

the side prism,

the GT emblem,

the door handles maybe,

and we can also remove the GT emblem from the rear.

And after we make all these changes, we are left with this.

 

Exhaust Pipes

We can add new mufflers to our car easily. What the difficult part is to find a donor. I happened to have found a pretty nice one I believe, it comes from the 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera provided by netcarshow.com. Here is the image. Click on it for full size!

Move it into Photoshop, and with the Pen Tool (P), select its nearest muffler. Just one, two won’t fit into this rear bumper we have. Once drawn a path, make a selection of it, and Copy&Paste it into our document. Of course it’s facing to the right, so we first have to flip it horizontally. Edit menu – Transform – Flip Horizontally does the trick for us. Make another copy of the muffler by pressing Ctrl+J. Move the two new exhausts into their positions, and rotate them just a little to fit the perspective of our car. You can also scale the further one down a bit. Try to nudge them into a decent position, not too in, not too much out. If needed, erease the back part of the mufflers for perfect fitting. Notice that the right exhaust pipe on the Mustang has a silencer behind it, I’ve also burnt it a little to give it a gray tint. Here is my result.

 

Roof

We can give our car an even more robust look by painting the roof black. Or at least somewhere near black.

For this, we’re going to need the Pen Tool (P) again to select the top portion of the car. Be careful not to accidentally select anything else. When done with the selection, Copy&Paste-in-place to create a new layer for it. And, of course, the drill is the same. First, Ctrl+Shift+U or Cmd+Shift+U to desaturate the layer, and then, Ctrl+L or Cmd+L to tweak the contrast a little. I’m using the values 90, 1.00, 250 on my project, here is what is looks like in the end.

 

Carbonizing

I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far. What I notice is that the back of the car (now that we’ve removed all the little detail-parts) looks pretty dull and empty. So why don’t we learn the technique of how we can create a carbon-fiber body part? Let’s do it!

Pen Tool (P) in hand, and create a selection between the two tail lights. Copy&Paste-in-place, desaturate, levels with values of around 60, 1.00, 255. Now we need a carbon-fiber graphic. Well, they say the bigger, the better, which is true in almost all cases. For this purpose though, a small image will do just fine, so here I have this image, which you can download and paste into your document.

Let’s rotate it to our own tastes, and position it over the trunk. Ctrl-Click our trunk layer, then while still on the carbon layer, invert our selection with Ctrl+Shift+I or Cmd+Shift+I, and press the Delete key to cut off the unneeded parts. One step left, set the blending mode to Overlay. Oh, if you’d like, you can desaturate the carbon layer, to make it Super-B&W.

 

Windows

No, I don’t mean the operating system, I mean our last step in this tutorial is to colorize the windshields.

You can grab your paths that we’ve created in the beginning, or you can use the Pen Tool (P). However you do, make sure you are selecting all three windshields. Copy&Paste them into their appropriate positions. Remeber to rotate by -2°s if you used your paths!

Now we want to apply a color overlay to them, so double-click their layer, and set a 30% black (#000000) color overlay with a blending mode of Linear Burn. If you still have some patience, you can set ~25% color overlay to the back windshield, and about 35-40% color overlay to the side windows. This requires separate layers though.

Here is my result for this step.

 

And we’re done… for now

Here is my end result for today’s virtual tuning tutorial. Full-size opun click, again.

What we have done:

• Created a new paint job
• Lowered the ride height
• Changed rims
• Made tail lights monochrome
• Removed unneeded parts
• Changed mufflers
• Made the roof black
• Created a carbonfiber trunk
• Darkened Windshields