Lowering tutorial

Heres a simple, but fairly detailed tutorial on how to lower a car, from an angled view in photoshop (pics included)

Heres our original image, a 2004 Acura TSX Background


What I plan to do, is to lower the car about 1.7 inches in the front, and about 1.5 in the rear to give it a more agressive stance.

First things first,
In order to be able to lower a car in photoshop, you must have a basic understanding of some of the more basic tools.



Tool # 1. The Polygonal Lasso Tool (Shortcut Key: V)
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It is used for selection areas with variable precision. How accurate and jagged your selection will come out, depends on how far you zoom in, and how many times you click the mouse. The further you zoom in, the more accurate it will be, and more clicks, the less jagged the selection will be. To use the polygonal lasso, select the lasso button from the toolbar on the left


and click a single point on the image to start the selection, as you click, the line will have a pivot point, and you can point the selection line in a new direction.

When I lower cars in photoshop, I always use the polygonal lasso, and I generally start on the left hand side of the image. The first point i click is on the very far side of the image, usually off the image sometimes as to make sure the entire side area will become selected in the end. I try to make my first point in an area where displacing part of the image will not make a huge effect, hence the reason why my selection does not start on the ground with the gradient shadow, I chose to select the left side where the background of the image is nearly a flat grey color. Then just click along the outline of the body parts making sure to keep abotu 1 pixel outside the car at all times to make sure you get the whole body selected. Once you have made it to the other side of the car, go off the other side of the image, and come up and around to select the rest of the image above the vehicle. Here is my final poly lasso selection:


Notice how I did NOT select the wheel gap, since we intend to get rid of it anyway.



Now for step two: Moving part of the image

Tool # 2. The Move Tool (Shortcut Key V)
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Select the move tool by either clicking the above icon on the toolbar, or by pressing the shortcut key V.

You can then click and drag your selection whereever you wish on the image, for this slight drop, only a slight movement is needed.

Here is the image after the move:


Now notice the black area on top of the image, we will get rid of that later so dont get all freaked out yet.



Step Three: Dropping the Front Lower Than the Rear
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Tool # 3. The Free Transform Tool (Shortcut Key Ctrl-T)
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For most slight drop differences, the free transform tool will help you greatly, it allows you to resize the selection, rotate it, skew it, modify it for perspective points etc....

But for now, press CTRL-T after you have selected the area to open the free transform tool. A rectangular line with 8 Boxes on it (1 per side, 1 per corner) will appear around your selection.

If you click and drag the boxes, your selection will be distorted in size and shape, but since we dont want to do that, we want to drop the the front of the car instead, what we will do, is move the cursor outside the box, and it becomes a rotational tool. So just click and drag outside the box, and the selection will rotate, since we only want a slight difference in the drop (0.2"), we will not rotate it very much. When you have acheived the desired angle, release the mouse button, and press ENTER, this will save the transformation changes you have made, to the image history, and exit the free transform tool.

Step Four: Getting Rid of The Black Space
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First thing, deselect your selection (CTRL-D)

Tool # 4. The Rectangular Selction Tool (Shortcut Key M)
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Select the rectangular selection tool by either clicking the above icon or by pressing the shortcut key M.

What you will want to do, is select all of the image that is visible, EXCEPT for the black area, which you do not want to have!

OPTION 1.

Then we will crop the image to get rid of the black area

Tool # 5. The Crop Tool
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The Image Cropping Tool Can be found on the Image menu, and it is called CROP


Once you click CROP, only the selection will remain in the image, and all that ugly black area will be gone.

TADA!!!

OPTION 2. (Works or does not work depending on the image background)

Use the rectanguar select tool to select some of the non black grey area at the top of the screen, press CTRL-T to open the free transform tool, and drag the boxes on the rectangle to adjust the selected grey area to cover up the black space. When done, press ENTER.

NOTE: Apply the same technique to getting rid of the black area on the sides also. This method does NOT ALWAYS WORK for getting rid of the black area, especially when it comes to having natural backgrounds such at trees.


Here is the final image of our lowered TSX:



Hope this helps, good luck and have fun.

Any comments or suggestions will be noted, and I may edit this tutorial to include them!

 

I never thought of lowering the car more in the front, to give it a agressive stance. I used to just lower the whole car evenly thanks for showing me that.
nice photoshop :

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Presidente
[B]I never thought of lowering the car more in the front, to give it a agressive stance.

 

tHANKS FOR THE INFO!

 

Hope they also offer these:

 

I like the blue

 

You think that front end will fit on our cars?

 

Very nice JCS, would be nice if they let us pick the interior color like that.

 

Those wheels are hot. They look like the Work Emotions 17's?

Chris

 

Has anyone seen under the hood of the 04???