Editing technique tips please?

[Congius]

Hey guys, just got a new BMW, and I posted pictures of it yesterday (My BMW 525i) and I was wondering what should I do to touch the images up? I have photoshop, but I don't know what would be "overediting" and ruin the picture versus making the picture just look cleaner. And tool tips would help!

 

[photo1x1.com]

Hi there,
car photography is probably the most retouched photography category besides beauty . There are many tutorials in the web, especially on youtube. Depending on what you want your final image to look like, you might choose to watch the one or the other.
So in general it is hard to overedit car images as long as it is done well. You could remove unwanted objects that you were unable to avoid when taking the image or replace the background all together to put the car on a racetrack image. If you take care about the direction of the light and the white balance in both images, people won´t even realize. You can add reflections to the car, darken the background to make the car stand out, etc, etc, etc.

The most important part though is getting an awesome shot from a great angle to start with.

 

[SuzukiGS750EZ]

What brand and model of camera do you use specifically?

 

[KmH]

Did you make Raw files for the original shots?
If you didn't and made JPEG files instead, there is way less headroom for doing edits.

I would open all of the photos in Photoshop Camera Raw.
Make sure Camer aRaw is set to the ProphotoRGB color space, 300 ppi, and pixel dimensions that as close as possible match your cameras image pixel dimensions.

The first 6 of your photos need to have the exposure of the car normalized (correct the about 1/2 stop under exposure). If you use the Adjustment Brush you can edit just the car (local edit) and not the entire photo (global edit). However, it takes some practice and skill to use the Adjustment brush effectively.

The last 3 I would consign to the Recycle bin.

Back to Camera Raw.
By opening those 6 photos in Camera Raw you can edit just 1 of them and then sync the edits to the other 5.

In the Camera Raw Basic panel move the Clarity and Vibrance sliders to +30.
In the Sharpening panel set the Amount to +25, Radius to 1.0, Detail to 25, and Masking to 0.

You could then open the the photos in Photoshop for more advanced local edits by clicking on Open Image.