a newbie photoshopper's first tries... dialup beware
 

Just started messin with photoshop recently, and thought I'd share my first few pathetic attempts at paintjobs. So here they are:

original:
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...05_smaller.jpg

heres a grey-ish color i kinda like
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...005%20grey.jpg

This one is the color of baby puke, but figured I'd throw it up anyway (pun intended:) )
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...05%20green.jpg

a bad job on red...
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...0005%20red.jpg

i really like the fade (or whatever its called) tool
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...005%20fade.jpg

feelin a little patriotic with this one:)
http://members.mustangworks.com/five...0005%20USA.jpg


I'm gonna learn to change wheels, hoods, etc here soon, but I think thats gonna take more practice than the colors

Something about the paintjobs just doesn't look right, any suggestions?

Not bad at all for your first time. I'm still trying to nail down Freehand 7 before I move onto Photoshop. The grey is my fav of the bunch.

i like the grey one & the fade to black, not bad man. ;) :D :D :D :D :D

i have photoshop and i could never figure out to change a certain object a certain color. How do you do it?:confused:

I suck at photoshop, I have 7.0 and the only thing I ever use it for is to resize images... LOL

wish I could find my copy of photoshop... :-(

Simply put, your starting colors are too bright/saturated. you want to decrease saturation or use slightly less "bright" colors. if you notice, your first alteration from the original looks great. In fact, the darker colors all look better than the brighter. However, since you are starting with a darker color, the reflections may not be as prominent, so you are losing "whiting" in the reflections, and the darker areas aren't as shaded as they should be.

Stiil, great job. Outdoor object color converting is probably the toughest thing to do, due to so many uncontrolable environmental factors.

I like the blue into grey. Keep it up, it is giving me ideas on a new paint job.

srv, our very own 2fastLX wrote up a 'how to' article on it, and thats what I followed. Its very basic, and easy to follow. I had never messed with photoshop, and was able to get these (although needing some work) on the first few tries. Its one helluva program.

here's his writeup: color change

he was also just made the moderator of a new "virtual bodyshop" forum over on stangnet. pretty cool idea for a forum

bigbandjohn, which way would you reccomend getting rid of the saturation. Using the desaturation button, or going through hue/saturation and changing the parameters manually?

the blue to grey paint-job looks bad-***:cool:

Pretty sweet... I think you would need to wax your car every 20 minutes if you painted it those colours. :D
Very Sweet though!
I like the Red... it looks like a Chrome Red.

§am.

Anyone kow how to get the colors to look more solid, but still have the reflections/shading/etc instead of looking like anodized metalloic colors. Even when I try black the color still has a blueish silver tint.

Here's a nice little "how to" site.

http://www.photoshopjunkie.com/tutorials.html

Drew,
Check out that web site cad614 posted and take a look at the tutorial on converting a black car to white. That's the way I do it and it works. Going all the way to white is ok, but I find it works best to take a car to a medium gray for the most realistic looking paint jobs in the end. Otherwise you can sometimes lose too much detail depending on image quality.

I see you took the tute one step farther and started messing with some gradients. Very nice! The only things causing your paint jobs to look oversaturated is the fact that you are working with a black paint job underneath. That's what is causing the "colored chrome" look you are getting. What's happening is the car is so dark that the color overlay is making it look like the image has too much contrast because the black paint is hiding the shadows of the car.

Lighten the body up a bit by following that tutorial then play with the saturation of the overlay layer by either lowering the opacity of the overlay layer a tad, or go to IMAGE>>>ADJUST>>>HUE/SATURATION and tweak the overlay layer until you get the desired effect.

What you have done is great though. Your selection of the body looks to have been done very well. Now since you seem to have the selection tool down try this - Increase the image size to 2400 pixels by whatever the proportional heght comes out to. Then try a flame selection and lets see some flames. Increasing the image size makes the selection tool a LOT more accurate.

Hope this inspires/helps you out ;)