I promised to do a more detailed walk through on a rig edit and had some time tonight as I was cleaning up another photo from a shoot of my car. I'm still not sold on the final photo yet, but going to get some feedback and criticism prior to finalizing it for posting on the feature. Overall I'm pretty happy with it and you'll see after the jump what I had to work with in the beginning and what steps I did to get the result I wanted!
This is the photo I started out with. As you can tell there was some extreme vignetting going on since I didn't have a proper ND filter. I ended up having to stack a circular polarizer and a few weaker ND filters to even get the exposure I wanted. This photo was originally shot to be a Falken Tires ad (later replaced with a much better photo) - so the important part was showing off the tread on the tire. Another thing I would just like to note was that I had to pull off this rig shot on my own. So basically I set the camera up on a timer, ran into my car and drove it very slowly, carefully and praying nothing horrible would happen. The first thing was to use the clone stamp tool to take out the extreme vignetting.
Cloning up the vignetting is fairly easy, especially given that the background is so blurred anyways. To the natural eye it's hard to tell the difference whether or not that portion of the photo was edited since it's just motion blur. The ground however you can notice some inconsistencies in the cloning to remove the vignetting. Since this rig shot was turn with the car turning (at a pretty extremely angle) it was hard to clone in the circular movement that resulted on the road. I'll address this later on in the edit.
Prior to getting to the rig, I focused on cleaning up all my sensor dust around the rig pole area. This is just in case I sample an area while cloning out the rig pole that has a dust. No need to double my work later by replicating a dot where I'm editing.
Here's a close up of the dust cleaned up - this is simply done by sampling an area close by the dust and using the clone stamp tool at around 20-30% and just clicking until it disappears.
Zooming back out it was time to focus on the rig pole itself. I used the pen tool to select the area right above my roof and to the top of the photo around the pole. Then it was simply just using the clone stamp to clean out the pole by sampling areas to the left and to the right of it.
After that I inverted my selection and shrunk the brush size really small to clean up the remainder of the suction up that was on my roof.
I then ran it through shadow/highlights to bring out everything in the rest of the photo. Again, since I really wanted to highlight the tread on the tire I had to adjust the photo to make sure that was exposed nicely. The photo itself is a little too bright for my liking, but I felt that it fits the shot and its intentions properly.
I then zoomed in on the inconsistency on the road from cloning out the vignetting. You can tell in this zoomed in shot exactly where it repeated. I didn't feel like spending hours cleaning this part up and knowing that not a lot of attention is placed there (especially if you never knew it was there to begin with) I did a real fast edit.
Using the clone stamp tool some more, instead of clicking I simply dragged the mouse at an angled downwards motion as to blur the area around there. Some of the lines are still there but for the most part that section is so blurred out you can't tell what was originally going on. Since it's the corner of the photo, this was acceptable in my opinion.
I then used the pen tool to extra the windows and the windshield of the car. I wanted to darken up the area some since it was pretty frosty and I felt that the rest of the photo lacked contrast. I used the pen tool to select each window and then used the burn tool to darken it up just a tad.
Selecting the windshield in order to burn just that portion.
I then cleaned up the spot on my windshield. I have no clue what it was :)
I then felt that the suspension showing was a distraction. Using the pen tool I once again selected out that area and darkened it all out using the burn tool.
And there you have the final result. Again, I'm not 100% sold that this will be the final. The photo lacks a bit of contrast and I'm not sure how much I like the ground being so bright... but as of now I'm pretty happy with the edit and will be including it in an upcoming feature on
www.tunerzine.com of the car. Hope you guys enjoy.
Source: dpMotiv
Filed under: Ramblings
Tags: bmw e92,
rig edit walk through,
how to edit a rig