Building An Image

So I had taken this photo of a new Ford GT supercar with a custom throwback paint scheme at a recent Saturday morning Cars & Coffee event at the (now former) PAG (Performance Auto Group) parking lot at the Irvine Spectrum and I thought the image lent itself well to a 'posterizing' treatment in Photoshop. It turned out to be not quite that simple. I'll take you through some of the steps it took to get to the final image below.

The original photo - unspectacular but had potential with a little post-production. Exposure isn't so hot - I think I left the white balance on 'daylight' even though it was an overcast morning. You can see the reflections of three people on the hood - getting rid of them was job number one.

Coverup layer - After adjusting exposure levels, color balance and contrast, and then posterizing the image using one of Photoshop's built-in filters, I wasn't happy with some of the color banding that resulted, so I isolated these areas on a separate layer and cleaned them up a bit. You can also see what I did to get rid of the reflections at the leading edge of the hood.

Overexposed - I created a duplicate layer of the car and purposely lightened it way up to bring out detail in the shadow areas underneath the car (left). The new isolated shadow is on the right. Finally, I added a black-to-gray gradient to clean up the background, and highlights on the windshield and headlight covers to get a final image I was happy with.