Rescue a car shot with a new background

Jon Adams shows how you can swap in a new backdrop in Photoshop

While I was at a village fete, I spotted this classic car. I shot it as an HDR image in the hope that the background would improve when it was aggressively processed. It didn’t. If anything, it got worse! So to see if there was a viable picture lurking somewhere in the frame, I had a play in Photoshop to see if could be rescued without too much fuss.

Since the background was the problem, the first thing I did was to grab the Pen tool and cut out the car. With the clean lines of the bodywork, it didn’t take long, and once the Path was complete, I right-clicked on it and turned it into a Selection.

After punching the cutout into a new layer, I then created a new background with Filter > Render > Clouds using the colours of the car. On top of this background, I added another layer with a transparentto-black Gradient. This let the car sit on pure black, so I didn’t need to worry about creating a shadow where it met the ground.

The windows presented a problem, as they still featured the old background, so I added a layer mask and painted them out to allow the new cloud background to show through. The contrast wasn’t quite right on the vehicle, so to pep it up, I created a Curves Adjustment Layer, clipping it to the car layer so nothing else would be affected. I pulled the Curve down a touch to get a good match.

Now the only issue left was the green strip along the chrome bumper. This was a reflection of the grass in the original, and it was at odds with the rest of the pic. To get rid of it, I made a rough, feathered selection around the green strip, then created a Hue/Sat Adjustment Layer. By moving the Hue slider, I quickly settled on a blue that matched the car.

The final step was to darken the area at the bottom of the wheels, so all the bits of grass would fade into obscurity. I did this by making a feathered selection of the area, then darkened it with another Curves Adjustment Layer.