AMC Eagle - My shot at changing colors on a car

[Church Rat]

Here comes another Photoshop manipulation by me! This time my subject is my very first car, the 1985 AMC Eagle. The picture was taken about 5 years ago, or more, so it's a scanned image from my old P&S camera. I haven't tried messing with scanned photos yet, so I thought I'd try it out.

I wanted to change the color of the car body and rims, and in the end I applied some blur to the background so the car would stand out. Come to think of it, I think I may have over done it with the blur.

This is what I did:
Used the Magnetic Tool to trace the car body and then copy it into a new Layer(1). I also did the same for the rims in a separate Layer(2). Then I went to Image-->Adjustments-->Color Balance... and sort of just tweak with it until I was satisfied with the "copper tone" colors.

At the end I selected the whole car and inversed the selected and added blur 7 or 8 times...too much?

That's it. What do you all think?

ORIGINAL

EDIT

The link below is of the photoshop interface while working on this picture (if you're interested)
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9261/photoshopinterfaceamceaox4.png

 

[John_05]

i think it looks great. i agree about the blur too though, it looks a little over done and makes it looks as though the car was added to the picture.

very nice work though.

 

[Augphoto]

Yes, the car does look like it was pasted in there.

 

[Church Rat]

Thanks for the feedback! Here is the same picture, but without the blur. Maybe it didn't really need to be blurred out.

 

[d1a1s1]

Is it possible to take the coloring out of the windows?

 

[Goldeeno]

If you duplicated the layer and changed the colour, lasso the windows and delete the colour layer, it will look better.

 

[Church Rat]

Okay, so I finally got around to editing the picture again. This time I removed the color from the windows as suggested (thanks!) so it shows the original windows.

It's starting to look like an actual paint job! :mrgreen:

 

[Goldeeno]

Just wondered if you had tried changing the colour using variations... thats what i normally use

 

[Church Rat]

No, I didn't use that method.

 

[glaston]

Concerning the blur.
The effect you're looking for is called Depth Of Field. You had it almost.
What I think you should do is to copy your original background layer, switch off visibility of the original BG once you've copied it.
On the BG layer copy, crop it so that there's only a little bit of the sidewalk left below the tires.
Now create a path using the pen tool around the car, then convert the path into a selection. Now choose edit>copy, then edit>"paste into". The paste into option will put the car on a new layer and automatically create a layer mask.
Apply the lens blur filter to that layer, and choose the layers transparency as the mask.
Play with the controls of the lens blur filter til you're happy.

If you crop the image til it's basically just the car with a little background around the perimeter you can use a higher blur setting.
But with all that stuff in the background and the entire sidewalk in the foreground, blurring too much makes the image look fake.
Remember that the point of blurring and DOF is to fake the appearance of using a high end lens with focal depth.
So if you were to walk out to that car with a nice DSLR to get the image, you would take a photo of just the car, not all that stuff in the background.
Having all that stuff in the background is also compositionally unsound.
You want to lead the viewers eye to the elements of the image that you're showing, which in this case is the car. The stuff in BG is just all too distracting for the viewer.

All in all though, the image is coming along nicely. Keep going...