Lotus Car Photography - Another Before & After

12:41 PM Lotus , Photography 1 Comments

It's not easy finding locations for car photos. Magical photographers seem to be able to see gorgeous shots in the most mundane settings, but when I roll around my fairly scrubby brown town, I just don't see those images pop to mind.

I suppose it's learning to see or know what will work in post, or to take the Winslow Homer approach to the art, and find the beauty in the mundane. I keep those thoughts in mind when out looking for locations, and feel damn lucky when an obvious one appears.

...like this historic bridge at Bartley Ranch, Reno, on an overcast Sunday afternoon. Dramatic in its structure, but not in the lighting (soft light is great for flattering portraits, but maybe not so much for gritty automotive subjects?), I thought I'd give it a go anyway.  Here's the original photo:

Original photo straight out of the camera

Now to the fun parts.

I had a ton of chromic abberation all around the backlit subjects - the bridge, car, and even the trees. Chromic Abberation is a halo effect in a strong color like blue, magenta, or green, that makes the subject a bit weird and pulsey, and just generally makes your photo look bad.

Lightroom has a nice tool for reducing chromic abberation, but because I was combining bits of photos with varying exposure levels together, I still had a bit of work to do with cleaning up the weirdness here and there.

Coming out of Lightroom with basic edits - looks pretty good

The trickiest parts were removing the background trash - reflective stakes, bits of green metal gate, a road, barrier, and cars. It amazes me how much ugly junk is put *everywhere* around us, even in "natural" settings like this one. It's not surprisingy that most settings where you can get a sportscar are littered with so much crap. Thank goodness for the band aid, clone, and mask tools in Photoshop!

I did my favorite Soft Light tints and highlights on the Lotus, color corrected the greeny-yellow headlight, sharpened up some edges, burned the background a bit to make the car stand out more, some color adjustment layers, and re-cropped for a more pleasing composition.  Still not perfect, but I feel like I'm improving!

The final photo with all the retouching in the background, pushing and pulling, and color work.