Tutorial: How to Photoshop Wheels on Your Ride
06-15-2004, 01:00 AM
#1
Photography Nerd
Thread Starter
Tutorial: How to Photoshop Wheels on Your Ride
Tutorial: How to Photoshop Wheels on Your Ride
Never have car upgrades been this cheap! Just pick some wheels you like, take a picture of your car, and in a few minutes you’ll have a pimpin new ride. You gotta love Photoshop!
Let me preface this whole tutorial with this: I am not a professional Photoshop user by any stretch of the imagination. I have however had a fair amount of experience with the program and picked up a few tricks along the way. By no means is this the definitive guide to Photoshopping wheels onto your car but if you are looking for a good place to get started, you found it. I used Photoshop CS for this tutorial but I’m not using anything exclusive to CS so version 6 or 7 should also be fine.
So here’s the challenge:
Volk LE28’s on a stock ABP TSX (thanks to Brooks for the photo)
Grab a beer, throw on some tunes, and let’s get started…
Open both of the above photos in Photoshop.
Before we can do much of anything, we need to do a little prep work on the wheels and the car. If you just copied and pasted the Volks onto the TSX you’d find that they are just too big and not quite the same shape. Resizing the wheels is the key to this tutorial but it’s really not that hard to do. The slacker way is to just copy and paste the wheels on the photo of the TSX and use the transform tool to resize the wheels to fit. Well, that way is fast and if you’re just trying to get a quick idea of what they’ll look like it should be fine. However, you tend to loose a lot of resolution in the wheels with that method and eventually it ends up looking like you drew them on with finger paint!
So how do you make the wheels fit but maintain the resolution of the original photo? Simple: resize the car to fit the wheels!
Here are the steps:
First, measure the height of the Volks and the rear wheel on the TSX using guides and the measure tool.
You’ll notice in this pic that the wheel is 174px high:
The rear TSX wheel is only 65px high:
Divide the height of the Volks by the height of the TSX wheel height and you get 2.677. Great, now go to Image -> Image Size
Pull out your calculator again and multiply the height of the TSX image by 2.677 which should give you 1244. Once you plug 1244 in the height box, the width box should automatically change to 689 if you have the “Constrain Proportions” box checked.
Hehehe, did I forget to tell you that math would come into this tutorial?
Don’t worry that’s as tough as it gets!
Ok so now you should have an inflated picture of a TSX and a photo of a Volk rim sitting in your workspace. The Volk rim and the rear TSX rim should be the same size if everything went well. Let’s shift our focus back on the Volk picture for a couple minutes…
We’re going to have to clean this photo up a bit before we paste it on the TSX. Create a blank background layer like this:
Switch to the top layer and get rid of the black background in the picture. The best way to do this is to use the Elliptical Marquee Tool and select the area around the face of the rim. Don’t worry if you can’t select it perfectly the first try, that’s why they invented the Transform Selection feature:
Once you have it tweaked to your liking, do an Inverse Select (right click) and hit the delete button. Then use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to select the inside of the rim spokes. Take your time doing this step because the cleaner the rim is now, the better it will look later. After you’ve done all that you should have a rim that looks like this:
Now we’re getting somewhere!
Copy this layer onto the picture of the TSX. You’ll notice that the height is pretty good but the width and the profile isn’t quite right. If you right click and go to “Free Transform” you’ll be able to tweak it to the right shape:
Right click while you’re in Free Transform and you’ll be able to select from a number of different ways to distort the wheel. Play around with them for a while until you get something that looks realistic like this:
Now all you have to do is hide the Volk layer, switch to the background, and remove the original TSX wheel. Just use a brush and some dark grey or black to paint over the rear wheel. Something like this:
And with the Volk layer shown:
Sweet!
You could stop now and you’d be farther ahead than 90% of people that attempt this Photoshop trick!
You’ve come this far so why don’t we take it to the next level and bring back those brakes…
Do a Google Image Search (GIS) for “brake rotors” and you should be able to find something like this:
Just clean it up exactly as we did the Volk picture and you should have something like this:
Now paste that image behind the Volk layer and rotate, resize, and transform it just like we did with the Volk rim.
You’ll notice that the rotor is pretty bright and doesn’t look very natural as is but relax, it’s an easy fix. Just go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. If you move the middle slider under the histogram to the right it will get darker. Play around with the levels until you get something you like.
Now let’s cast a shadow from the spokes on to the rotor to give it that extra bit of realism…
Copy the center section of the rim and paste it just behind the rim and in front of the rotor. This may seem a little weird but trust me for a minute.
Now right click on the layer in the Layers Pallet and select Blending Options -> Drop Shadow. These are the settings I used but feel free to use what works best for you:
Now resize the picture back down to the original 465x254px and…
Guess what?
You’re done! (well, one wheel anyways!)
Just follow the same steps for the front wheel and you’ll end up with something like this:
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you found it useful, hit me with some +ve rep points (I’ve got to catch TSX ‘R’ US somehow…). :P
I’m always around so send me a PM if you have any questions or found some errors in my tutorial. I’d be happy to revise it.
Dan
Never have car upgrades been this cheap! Just pick some wheels you like, take a picture of your car, and in a few minutes you’ll have a pimpin new ride. You gotta love Photoshop!
Let me preface this whole tutorial with this: I am not a professional Photoshop user by any stretch of the imagination. I have however had a fair amount of experience with the program and picked up a few tricks along the way. By no means is this the definitive guide to Photoshopping wheels onto your car but if you are looking for a good place to get started, you found it. I used Photoshop CS for this tutorial but I’m not using anything exclusive to CS so version 6 or 7 should also be fine.
So here’s the challenge:
Volk LE28’s on a stock ABP TSX (thanks to Brooks for the photo)
Grab a beer, throw on some tunes, and let’s get started…
Open both of the above photos in Photoshop.
Before we can do much of anything, we need to do a little prep work on the wheels and the car. If you just copied and pasted the Volks onto the TSX you’d find that they are just too big and not quite the same shape. Resizing the wheels is the key to this tutorial but it’s really not that hard to do. The slacker way is to just copy and paste the wheels on the photo of the TSX and use the transform tool to resize the wheels to fit. Well, that way is fast and if you’re just trying to get a quick idea of what they’ll look like it should be fine. However, you tend to loose a lot of resolution in the wheels with that method and eventually it ends up looking like you drew them on with finger paint!
So how do you make the wheels fit but maintain the resolution of the original photo? Simple: resize the car to fit the wheels!
Here are the steps:
First, measure the height of the Volks and the rear wheel on the TSX using guides and the measure tool.
You’ll notice in this pic that the wheel is 174px high:
The rear TSX wheel is only 65px high:
Divide the height of the Volks by the height of the TSX wheel height and you get 2.677. Great, now go to Image -> Image Size
Pull out your calculator again and multiply the height of the TSX image by 2.677 which should give you 1244. Once you plug 1244 in the height box, the width box should automatically change to 689 if you have the “Constrain Proportions” box checked.
Hehehe, did I forget to tell you that math would come into this tutorial?
Don’t worry that’s as tough as it gets!Ok so now you should have an inflated picture of a TSX and a photo of a Volk rim sitting in your workspace. The Volk rim and the rear TSX rim should be the same size if everything went well. Let’s shift our focus back on the Volk picture for a couple minutes…
We’re going to have to clean this photo up a bit before we paste it on the TSX. Create a blank background layer like this:
Switch to the top layer and get rid of the black background in the picture. The best way to do this is to use the Elliptical Marquee Tool and select the area around the face of the rim. Don’t worry if you can’t select it perfectly the first try, that’s why they invented the Transform Selection feature:
Once you have it tweaked to your liking, do an Inverse Select (right click) and hit the delete button. Then use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to select the inside of the rim spokes. Take your time doing this step because the cleaner the rim is now, the better it will look later. After you’ve done all that you should have a rim that looks like this:
Now we’re getting somewhere!
Copy this layer onto the picture of the TSX. You’ll notice that the height is pretty good but the width and the profile isn’t quite right. If you right click and go to “Free Transform” you’ll be able to tweak it to the right shape:
Right click while you’re in Free Transform and you’ll be able to select from a number of different ways to distort the wheel. Play around with them for a while until you get something that looks realistic like this:
Now all you have to do is hide the Volk layer, switch to the background, and remove the original TSX wheel. Just use a brush and some dark grey or black to paint over the rear wheel. Something like this:
And with the Volk layer shown:
Sweet!
You could stop now and you’d be farther ahead than 90% of people that attempt this Photoshop trick!
You’ve come this far so why don’t we take it to the next level and bring back those brakes…
Do a Google Image Search (GIS) for “brake rotors” and you should be able to find something like this:
Just clean it up exactly as we did the Volk picture and you should have something like this:
Now paste that image behind the Volk layer and rotate, resize, and transform it just like we did with the Volk rim.
You’ll notice that the rotor is pretty bright and doesn’t look very natural as is but relax, it’s an easy fix. Just go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. If you move the middle slider under the histogram to the right it will get darker. Play around with the levels until you get something you like.
Now let’s cast a shadow from the spokes on to the rotor to give it that extra bit of realism…
Copy the center section of the rim and paste it just behind the rim and in front of the rotor. This may seem a little weird but trust me for a minute.
Now right click on the layer in the Layers Pallet and select Blending Options -> Drop Shadow. These are the settings I used but feel free to use what works best for you:
Now resize the picture back down to the original 465x254px and…
Guess what?
You’re done! (well, one wheel anyways!)
Just follow the same steps for the front wheel and you’ll end up with something like this:
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you found it useful, hit me with some +ve rep points (I’ve got to catch TSX ‘R’ US somehow…). :P
I’m always around so send me a PM if you have any questions or found some errors in my tutorial. I’d be happy to revise it.
Dan
wow, that's how you put the brake in, nice!
Trending Topics
06-15-2004, 07:52 AM
#8
MMM mmm, somebody's getting points for this!
06-15-2004, 08:48 AM
#13
Photography Nerd
Thread Starter
Oh I forgot to mention, if anyone wants a copy of the PSD file, just PM me with your email address and I'll send it to you. It's a little easier to see how all the layers work when you have the PSD open.
06-15-2004, 02:51 PM
#16
Senior Moderator
Originally Posted by Dan Martin
Tutorial: How to Photoshop Wheels on Your Ride
Grab a beer, throw on some tunes, and let’s get started…
Grab a beer, throw on some tunes, and let’s get started…
Thanks Dan, that's pretty helpful.
:ghey: 
06-27-2004, 12:19 PM
#22
Geaux Tigers!!!
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Baton Rouge, LA
Age: 41
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Awesome tutorial Dan. I was finally able to use my mouse with my right hand! I've been trying to do this tutorial with my left hand on the mouse (since my surgery and all), but it just wasn't working. Here's what I did (used Perth_Euro's car)
hope that works.
btw, I just did the front wheel cuz i am lazy. I used an image of the new G-Racing Niko wheels cuz they are sweeeet!
~Amanda
hope that works.
btw, I just did the front wheel cuz i am lazy. I used an image of the new G-Racing Niko wheels cuz they are sweeeet!
~Amanda
06-27-2004, 12:55 PM
#23
Photography Nerd
Thread Starter
Glad your arm is healing. 
Good work on the photoshop. The only thing I would do is make the wheel a little darker and add a little blue tinge to it. Try using the levels feature and perhaps a little color balance to make it look a little more realistic.
Good work on the photoshop. The only thing I would do is make the wheel a little darker and add a little blue tinge to it. Try using the levels feature and perhaps a little color balance to make it look a little more realistic.
06-27-2004, 12:57 PM
#24
Geaux Tigers!!!
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Baton Rouge, LA
Age: 41
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yeah, i already went back and made the wheel a little darker... i'll try to make it appear a little more blue too. i'll post it again if and when i get it looking better.
~Amanda
edit: ok, here's what I've got... it's not quite perfect, but I've got to start studying and stop photoshopping :'(
~Amanda
edit: ok, here's what I've got... it's not quite perfect, but I've got to start studying and stop photoshopping :'(
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