Hi Carl,
Thanks for the comments. Your right, I should write a tutorial on how to do these. I'll see what I can do, but I'm very busy this summer...perhaps this autumn or winter. This specific retouch took awhile. There's four separate images here: the bike, the sand dunes, the sky, and of course the logo. I believe I had about 20 layers going, most of them with masking. In any event, to start, you want to isolate the subject from it's background; you need to select it. And the absolute best way to do this with subjects that have hard, well defined edges is to use the Pen Tool to draw a path and then turn that path into a selection. The Pen Tool has no equal. This entire motorcycle, as well as all the other automobile retouches I've done here, was selected using the Pen Tool. This is how I begin. From there, you can do pretty much anything to the background, such as applying a blur, darken it, replacing it, etc. But stay in touch, I just may do a tutorial sooner than later :-)
Regards,
Bill
Carl Constantine
31-Jul-2006 23:53
I'd really love to know how you do these vehicle retouches to give them that advertising look or magazine cover look. Would you be willing to post a full tutorial with some files for us to learn. There are a couple in this forum that are quite spetacular.
