Just to take a little breather from all of the features and stuff, I thought I’d post up an edit again like I used to. Been getting a few questions on how long it takes to edit with all of these shoots that I’ve been doing. Honestly, it can take anywhere from an hour to several hours, depending on how many shots I took or the type of look I’m going for. One of the biggest reasons for long editing times – as those of you that shoot and edit may know – is shooting the car in a distracting scene. For example, a shot in the downtown area will often include other cars, light posts, signs and other things that you really don’t want in the picture. So you end up cloning them out of the picture to put more emphasis on the car rather than distracting elements.

Other times, it’s really just making the car pop and making sure everything is aligned. For the shots of Jackie’s NSX, we shot in a fairly secluded area where there weren’t too many things that needed to be taken out. The red also does a good job of standing out so little has to be done…

The before shot – straight off the camera. No editing done except for resize and watermark. The original picture itself is already good – and most of that is credited to all of the colours working well together. This is one of the reasons I love shooting coloured cars – it’s easy to make them pop. Black and white are particularly more difficult. The only things that need to be “fixed” is that the picture is off level just a tad and there’s a utility box over to the left that needs to be cloned out.

After processing. Since it’s Fall, I wanted to give it a warm touch and the leaves and grass were already starting to turn orange/yellow, so I thought I’d help expedite it. I changed the hue of the grass and trees to a more yellow and orange colour and left the darker greens. I darkened the skies a bit and removed the baby blue hue to keep the colours warm. I cloned out the utility box to the left and rotated the picture 0.3 degrees counter clockwise and re-cropped it to level everything out. Lastly – I did some dodging and burning on parts of the NSX to make it pop just a bit more. I spent more time on the wheels in particular – getting that graphite to pop more, got the brake discs to shine through and removed the “rust” orange colour to them. I lightened up the front bumper and the side of the car a little to make the red pop.

All in all, I generally like the warm tone over the cooler tone for most pictures – it gives it a more natural feel, especially for a scene and car like this. This process didn’t take me too long, but in other photos that have poles and wires in the back or rock chips and cracked bumpers on the cars, it can take up anywhere from half an hour to an hour to fix it all. All in a days work, I suppose!