Automotive Photography 101 | How To Photograph Cars! + Editing!

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, my name is Pat and today we're going to be talking about automotive photography. I've personally been shooting cars for close to five years now and I've made a lot of mistakes along the way, but overall it has been an amazing journey. So the goal of this course as it take you from knowing little to nothing about automotive photography, to getting out and confidently shooting. After this course, we're going to be talking about essential equipment, lighting, locations, and much more. Now what started out as me just wanting to take better photos of my car has led me to work with companies that I could never have imagined, such as BC racing and performance, Volkswagen magazine. So I'm extremely excited to teach you guys my tips and tricks on shooting automotive photography. So let's get started and what I call automotive photography 101. 2. Essential Equipment: All right, So equipment, although arguably all you need is a camera, I'm going to be showing you cheap and buy cheap. I mean, inexpensive and easy to get equipment that will take your automotive photography to the next level without breaking the bank. So firstly, as I mentioned, you're going to need a DSLR or mirrorless camera of some sorts, a few different lenses, or a lens that's versatile, a tripod, and one of the most important tools for automotive photography, a CPL, also known as a circular polarizer. Okay, So starting off with a camera just to cover some basics, make sure you are shooting in manual mode. And you are shooting in RAW and JPEG, because this plays a huge role in post-production, which we'll be talking about later. So next, make sure you grab a lens. For now, I'll be using my 28 days, 70 millimeter that actually came with the A7 3 as it's a generic lens, but it's very versatile. Keep in mind, your camera does not have to be anything crazy as long as it's capable of shooting in manual mode and shooting in RAW, then you're good to go, even if your camera's not capable of those two things, as long as you get a CPL, you're still good to go. So the CPL actually screws onto the lens and allows you to spin or rotate the filter. And basically what this does is eliminate most of the reflections, similar to a pair of polarized sunglasses. This filter cuts down the amount of glare and reflection. So essentially think of this as sunglasses for your camera with the right exposure. This can really add a lot of detail to your photos. I'll be showing you that a little later. Best thing is depending on your lens, you actually can grab a CPL from Best Buy. Usually, you know, if you have a Best Buy near you, you can go in there and you should be able to find one that's actually where this one's from. Or you can order on B and H, which usually has pretty fast ship times. If you don't know what the other side's you have, it's usually marked on the lens or just a quick search will tell you next, you're going to want to bring a tripod. Even if you don't, then you're going to need it, still bring it in, never know, uh, kinda situation you can end up in. You could be doing a sunset shoe and it gets cloudy or dark earlier than expected, and you still want to shoot on a low ISO. If you have a tripod, you can easily slap the camera on the tripod, lower that shutter speed, keep your ISO low, keep the noise low, and you're still good to go and be able to get good photos rather than having to open your aperture wide open and be shooting handheld on a low shutter speed. So bring a tripod. You really never know when you're going to need one. Odds are if you're shooting a car, you may not find yourself using it as much depending on your pace. But for the most part, it's always safe to bring, I promise you, it'll be worth it. Bring a tripod, as I mentioned earlier, bring up versatile lens such as the 2008 to 70 over a 24 to 70, 635, 28 to 10, 05, anything like that. So that way it gives you a decent wide and also a good range all the way up to nice tight photo. It really can change the way your photos look and just bring a good versatile lens. I usually don't use a lot of prime lenses, or if I do, I'm constantly switching to the next one. So that's why I recommend bringing a versatile one just to get out there and be able to do this all at once, get different angles and just get a good feel for what you can do with one lens. So those few things is actually all you're going to need to be taking dramatically better automotive photographs, especially the CPL. I feel like a lot of people miss out on filters or they're just used to ND filters. And a CPL can be used for a wide variety of things. But when we're talking automotive photography, this is a key component and absolute essential, especially looking at is shooting without a CPO and then it's a night and day difference. You definitely need one. Check out your best buy order, one-off b and h, find the right size. I'm telling you this is going to be what dramatically changes your automotive photography. I'll be showing you guys that live when we get out there and shoot. So that's all the equipment you're going to need to start taking better automotive photographs. 3. Location and Lighting: All right, So next we're going to be talking about location and lighting as the subjects usually work hand in hand. Firstly, what I do, and this is very straightforward. I drive around, I literally get in my car and I drive around. If I plan on shooting at sunset or golden hour, what I'll do is the day before, maybe a couple of days before I plan on shooting, I will pack up all my equipment, get in my car, drive around for 20 to 30 minutes, take roads that you've never been down before. Just keep your eye out. That's literally what I do. This has never really let me down. I just packed my stuff and I drive. And like I said, sometimes the most simplest locations can be the best or there's a location right under your nose and you don't even know it, even if you live in a big city, I'm sure there's parts of the city you don't go too often. So just drive around and look for something unique, look for something new. When usually once you get there and set up and scouted out, you'll notice things that you didn't expect and it'll just be that much better. So the second thing is very simple as well. Google, google Maps, Google searches, a simple search of local places, public places can lead you to a world of new locations that you didn't know existed. Like I said, seeing them online and actually getting there and seeing it in person are totally two different things. So definitely drive around and look for locations, but also hop on Google and look for some, you know, photo-op places near you. And maybe it'll turn into something awesome, Republic park or anything like that. I also want to mention that location is not everything while location does play an important role in capturing the car and telling the story, it is not everything. Like I said, sometimes the simplest locations make for the cleanest photographs. One of my favorite spots to photograph horse as five minutes from my house. And it's pretty much just an open field with some trees in the background. But under the right lighting conditions, this place is an absolute goldmine for photos. It's one of my places to go. And like I said, sometimes the simplest places can lead to some of the most epic shots, but also, you know, chaotic backgrounds also can be some awesome stuff as well. So if you do live in a city and you don't have access to big urban areas. Urban environments are also an awesome way to photograph cars. They look super awesome. Alright, so lighting is one of the most important roles when photographing a car. I'm gonna talk about times that I tried to avoid shooting cars, and that is midday when the sun is directly above and the lighting is extremely harsh. This is not a fun time to be outside shooting pictures of a car, especially if there's not very many clouds in the sky. Now the times when you kinda can't get away, this is a good day of overcast to diffuse that harsh sun. But if there's no overcast and the sun's right above, I generally try to avoid shooting pictures only because it's going to blow out the highlights. And even with a CPL, you really can't shoot especially at a low aperture. It's, it's really one of those things where the best time to actually go, the three best times, in my opinion, to go out and shoot cars is Sunrise, golden hour and sunsets. Now it's golden hour and sunset to each other, but sometimes people just prefer sunset. I say shoot from golden hour into sunset. And like I said, sunrise is also very, very great time to shoot as you have nice soft lighting as the sun's starting to rise, being diffused by trees and buildings or whatever you have around you, really giving you a nice soft light. And same thing with golden hour. It's right before that sun goes down and the lighting gets nice and crispy and gold. Perfect conditions for shooting a car. Absolutely amazing as well as sunset. You can get some really good shots. But like I said, you're going to need a tripod for that, so make sure you have that and you'll be good to go. So in recap, definitely try to find a nice simple location. Dr. Around, find a new place, take some new roads. You never know what you're going to find. If that doesn't work, hop on Google and definitely scout out a location, you can find one, at least go. Like I said, if you've never been there, just go check it out. This could be the next great photo spot for you. Once you've found a location, maybe the day prior, couple of days prior visit that location during those different lighting scenarios that you might want to shoot, whether that's sunrise, golden hour, or sunset, that way you can see what that location looks like under those lighting conditions. So let's get ready for our shoot. 4. Getting Started: Okay, So we have made it to our location. This location I actually found on Google Maps and it's only like 20 minutes from my house. I never knew if this was like a public road and it actually is and it leads you to this nice little park that's actually under construction. So we're mainly going to be using this small space as well as the road to take these photographs. We have these nice big trees over here that are diffusing the light perfectly because the sun actually hasn't quite set yet. It's getting close to around 06:00 PM. And golden hour starts at around 615 and lasts until close to seven o'clock, maybe a few minutes after. So we're here a little bit before that since this is nestled down and there's a lot of higher ground surrounding the area. We want to make sure that while we're here, the lighting is good and not too dark. So right now the lighting is acting as if it almost is golden hour, except we do have a lot of shadows, but the sun is able to peak in at a very nice angle. So that brings us to our next thing. We're actually photographing my 1979 Volkswagen rabbit. And we're going to be going over the steps I take before I actually start taking the photos. To me, this is very important because especially closer to sunset, time is very important. So this helps precalculate some shots, figure out exactly what we're going to be shooting. Some things we want to pay attention to and certain detail shots as well as making sure the car is clean. So we're not spinning an absurd amount of time or moving objects in post-production, which we'll get into later as well. So let me show you guys what I do before I shoot. This is kinda like appreciate checklist. It saves you time in the long run and it makes sure that your shots are detailed and you're showing off tons of different things about the car, not just a few simple shots or repetitive shots. You really want to be able to take your time, go around the car, find some details. Every single car has its own details, whether it's a commuter car, a vintage car, a brand new car, a supercar, SportsCar, a modified car. I mean, every single car has its own little bit of details that comes from the factory. And then even cars, you know, that people are modifying and touching. There's always those really subtle details. So the best thing to do is before the shoot to go around the car, find some of those details. If you're shooting a client or a friend, ask them some details about their car, some things that they've changed and make sure that you photograph those parts because that helps tell the story of that car. So let's get into my little appreciate checklist. Okay. So I like to start with having the car in a general position. I'm not really going to be photographing too much in this area because we have a sign behind us and there's some trash and construction stuff going on in the background, so we're going to try to avoid shooting it that. So again, place your car where you think you're going to want to photograph it and really make sure that there's nothing in the background that's going to be too distracting and take away from your car or would cut off at the roof line. You don't want those types of things are extremely distracting. So the car is generally placed in a decent spot for me to at least be able to gauge the lighting situation that we're dealing with. So now I like to go around and look for some details. Now obviously this is my car, so I know a lot of the details, but you'd be surprised how many random things you'll notice even about your own car. And that's why I recommend taking this time before you start shooting to find those detail. So let's take a look at some of the details that we're going to be photographing. All right, so once you've located those detailed shots, the next best thing to do, again to save you time later on is to actually clean the car. I always usually bring quick details, bear with me as well as micro fibers. Even if I'm shooting a client's car or a friend's car and my own vehicle, I always bring it with me. It literally will save you so much time. It'll make your photos so much better and you won't have to worry about dealing with really tedious things in post-production. So next we're just going to quickly wiped down the car of any dirt and debris. Again, just to save ourselves some time, grab yourself a microfiber, grab some detail spray, and just take a couple minutes, go around and get rid of any dirt or dust. It'll save you so much time in the long run. All right. Like I said, my current situation, there's a little bit too much going on in the background. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to move the car to get a way better composition to eliminate having to Photoshop out stupid little stuff. So like I said, either take some steps around and look to see maybe where you can change or hide some things. And then once you found that, Then from there all you really have to do is start snapping some pictures. So I'm going to take some walks around, maybe reposition the car, and let's get into taking our first photographs. 5. Shooting A Full Set: All right, so now that we have the current position and ready to photograph, we have our camera setup on our tripod shooting in manual mode and shooting in RAW. And we currently have that 28 to 70 millimeter lens. And we're going to be starting off with taking our photos straight on for this scenario since we're parked on a road, my opinion is the best time to start is with a straight on shots. And then we're gonna get into some rear shots and then we'll talk about some other angles you could do. So yeah, let's get started. Like I said, on the 28 to 70, we got the CPL on it and we're ready to start firing. So one of the things that really helps with taking your photos is I like to actually bracket them. So I'll take one a little overexposed, Another one at a perfect exposure according to the cameras light meter, and then one a little bit underexposed because you never know what Look, you'll end up liking more when it comes to editing. So that's one of the most important things that I do during my sets of photos as I like to take overexposed, normal exposure and underexposed. So another thing I actually like to do is move myself closer to the car so that way I can shoot at a little bit of a wider angle and not be so tight. I don't want every shot to be super tight. Those shots were shot at 70 millimeter. Currently, we're actually at 50 millimeters. So we're gonna take a couple shots here using the same technique, underexposed, normal exposure, and overexposed. All right, so now that we got our front on shots, what we're going to want to do is we're not going to stop here with that. We're actually going to change the angle of these photographs to show a totally different perspective of the car from the front. Since we're pretty much close to eye level here, this is as most people would be seeing it. We're actually going to want to get a nice low angle and then some high angles as well to diversify our set of photos. Now the best way to do this for our lower angle is to actually take it off the tripod and get a little bit lower. And we're actually going to be shooting this at 28 millimeters at the widest that we can. And we're standing about six feet away from the car right now. So again, same three techniques. Normal exposure, underexposed, overexposed. All right, and now we're going to want to do the same thing from up high, but we're actually going to switch to the tripod for that. As long as you have a tripod that can extend itself, you should be totally fine. You can do this handheld as well. But since I have the tripod, I'm going to just do it on the tripod. And again, the same three techniques here. This angle is already totally changing the look of the car. And that's why these types of things are super important. Which is also why it's super important to bracket your shots because in the moment you may think a great exposure, a little bit overexposed is the right way to go. And then you get home, you start editing and you find yourself hitting a wall with certain things, maybe too much noise in the shadows or the highlights are too far blown out. So that's why I recommend bracketing it will really save you time from those little tedious things. And the way we're bracketing is half a stop to one-stop underexposed, even exposure and then half a stop to one-stop overexposed. So now here we are in the rear of the car basically rinsing and repeating the steps that we did in the front of the vehicle. We're shooting right now, I level. So let's get rolling through these and then we're gonna go low angle and high angle as well. All right, so now that we've finished up in the rear, what I like to do is basically walk around the car or sometimes I'll start in the rear and basically mix up the angles. So maybe we'll get some rear shots looking this way down the side of the car. And then we're going to tie in some of those detail shots that are extremely important to adding some diversity to our set of photos. So yeah, we're basically gonna go counterclockwise around the car. You can do this in whichever way you prefer. This is just the way that I photograph and just find those details, find those right angles basically following those same three steps. The underexposed, even exposure and overexposed as well as a high level shot, a low angle, and a high angle. Those will really break up your photos and showed totally different perspectives of the car. Mixing up those angles going from high to low to eye level, Crilly really diversifies and shows a totally different perspective of the car. And having that CPL manages eliminates those reflections. And it really helps capture the car and shown immense amount of detail. You know, you can shoot right through the glass without having to worry about it being blown out. And you can see the interior all in the same shot, which is a beautiful thing. And if you don't have a CPL, the reflections are absurd. I'm I'll actually show you guys a before and after of this car. No CPL, as you guys can see, harsh highlights. Cpl, Boom, fix those problems, eliminated reflections and gave way more detail to the photo. Both of those photos were shot on the same exact settings from the same exact perspective. Just one with a polarizer and one without. And you can just see how much detail that polarizer brings out. All right, so now that we've shot the car kind of from a counterclockwise 360, starting with the front, going straight to their air and then working around the car. We're going to do next is actually focus on those detail shots. As you guys saw all the shots on the screen of what we're working with. We've pretty much covered all the basics and now those detail shots are going to be what separates your photos from the rest of the photo. So let's get started with my favorite part of shooting cars. That details, details can exist all over the car. For example, on this car we have the Volkswagen emblem right on the hub cap. We have these awesome 70s pin stripes going down the car. We can take some really cool photos showing those pinstripes going down the whole car, Volkswagen logo. A lot of stuff going on in the interior, which we'll talk about. All right, so let's get started with these detailed shots. All right, so once we've captured those amazing detail shots, the last thing I move onto is the interior. And for this, I actually don't use the 2008 to 70. I use my 16 millimeter, which is a manual focus by SLR magic. It's a great lens to capture interiors. It's a manual focus, like I said, very simple, very easy to use lens. And it really shows the entire interior of cars, especially this one, since it's pretty small. So let's get started on some interior photographs. So like I said, we're moving over to my 16 millimeter just to capture some interior shots. I'm going to be going over the basics of capturing the interior of a car and some of the things you wanna do and not do. So let's get started. This is a spot I'm ever rarely in him this car, but we are in the interior as you guys can see. All right. So now that we're in the interior and we're sitting in the backseat, we have a good perspective of the driver's seat, the passenger seat, the entire dash, the shifter, the steering wheel, that gauge cluster. Really all we have to do is find some good angles and snap some good photos from the backseat, and then we'll move up into the front seat. Alright, once we shot our photos from there, we're looking into the front. Now we are sitting in the driver's seat. We're going to do some up-close detail shots such as the gage clusters, the steering wheel, the shifter, anything that shows any sort of detail of the car. You're going to want to photograph some unique things such as the radio in this car that dash Matt, You know, like I said, every car kinda has its own unique, especially interior. So just try to find those things that are a little bit different than other cars you've seen or been in. And those are the things that you want to show off about the car. Another way to capture the inside if you don't have a wide-angle, is to just roll the window down and get some good shots of the dash, the steering wheel, the gauge cluster, the shift or whatever, you know, interesting things are going on inside that interior. Alright guys, so that wrapped up our shoot here just in recap, what we did was some straight on angles from shooting eye level, low angle, and above, and repeating those steps, going the whole way around the car as well as taking every shot, One half a stop to one-stop underexposed and even exposure have to one-stop overexposed. And again, repeating those angles, repeating those exposures, the hallway around the car. And then what we did is we moved on to the detailed shots. The things that you noticed about the car, maybe when you first got there or maybe from Instagram or whatever the case may be. Just focusing in on those details and showing the uniqueness about that specific car. Those are extremely important and take your photography to the next level, especially with automotive. Then lastly, we move to the interior of the car just to capture some good shots looking in at the driver and passenger seat, that dash layout, the instrument cluster, the shifter, the dash, whatever interesting things are going on inside that car, you're going to want to photograph because again, that brings people a totally different perspective. They feel like they're there. They can see it at all different angles. It really shows off the entire car versus just capturing its good side or it's bad side are good lighting, backlighting. This will really help you a lot in the post-production, especially with the bracketing exposures, to really find what suits your style the best and what will separate your photos from the rest. So that's a wrap on our shoot. Let's head back to the office and actually show you guys in depth the photos that we took. And let's actually start editing them. 6. Editing | Stylizing and Finalizing: All right, So after our shoot and it's time to begin the editing process is can be a very crucial point when it comes to developing a consistent set of photos. When we're talking about how to bring more detail, whatever images stylize and enhance our images. And lastly, clean up and finalize our images will be using Adobe Lightroom Classic for this tutorial as well as Adobe Photoshop to make our images perfect. So let's hop over to the computer and take a look at our photos. All right, here we are in Adobe Lightroom Classic. What I like to do is right after the shoot, I put my SD card in my computer. I import every single photo I took into a new folder. And then I open that folder and Adobe Lightroom and I import every single one. Don't be choosing the ones you think you like based off of the thumbnails. Because remember, we did bracketed exposures for most of these photos. So they're going to play a totally different role once you open them and start to edit them, don't be picking the ones that you think you like based on the thumbnail. Some might look too dark, some might look too bright, but it's not until we start editing them that we find how useful those photos may be in that photo always could be the one. So I can tell these two are the same exposure. It looks like we took a total of 72 ish pictures. Looks like a little incident there. Hey, it happens. We're gonna go under the Develop tab. And to get right into it, I like to open my crop. Everything looks pretty even for the most part, nice and level. Always start with your crop and adjust things. Make sure things are level. You don't want things to be too off centered and looking goofy, especially when you're shooting on a flat surface. So one thing you're gonna come to find when you're shooting more automotive photographs is the shadows are always super dark in very specific places, such as the grill around the tires and the interior. Essentially all car manufacturers add contrast to their cars to break up, you know, not just having one color and keeping the car boring. And the best contrast color is black as it goes with every color, even dating back to my 1979 rabbit. So as we can see, our grills black. So we're losing a little bit of detail in there. It's a little dark, as well as around the front lip, it is visible, but we're also losing detail in the interior, so we're going to jump right into it. What I like to do is start with adjusting my shadows. We're going to be operating under the basic tab for these adjustments. And just the adjustments we're gonna make here are going to make your photos that much more detailed. And spot on though, like I said, starting with the shadows, I like that pretty much drag this the whole way up at first to see where we're at. And that's a little bit too much. We lost. We got a lot of detail out, but we're also losing a lot of contrast. So I'm going to bring this down to about, about there, about 77 from there. If we hold Alt on your keyboard, this is how I like to add contrast in rather than doing the contrast here. Because when you use the contrast slider here, it's going to be adjusting the highlights and the shadows at the same time. Versus you can pretty much do that in these tabs here. So I like to start with blacks, and we drag this down while holding all, it'll show us what it will basically be totally blacked out. And if we drag it to the right, it'll show us where the blacks are fully exposed. So we're going to do the opposite of that. We're going to add some contrast back in and we can see where we're getting contrast. We want it back in those areas just a little bit. We don't want the highlights to be totally blown out, which as we can see if we drag to the right here, they're pretty much white at that point. So we're going to drag those down to about here. I normally do not play with texture or clarity as it adds a lot of unwanted edginess and sharpness to the images. You can play with this if that's your style. But personally, I'm not into that. What I do like to do is I actually like to turn the saturation down because we're actually going to come in later on and individually select the colors that we want to enhance and bring vibrance and color 2, or maybe also manipulate and change the hue of. So that's everything we're gonna be covering in the basic tab. And next we're actually going to be moving on to the tone curve. There are so many ways to use the Tone Curve tool, such as changing colors of things. But we're actually going to be playing with the colors in a different slider actually right underneath us. So for now what I always like to do is add three points to our curve. Down here is your shadows, mid tones and highlights. I like to start by dragging our shadows down just enough to where those adjustments are still shown. But again, we're adding just a little bit more contrast to the image. Now here's our mid tones where we can increase or decrease the exposure of I'm going to bring it up and over just a little bit while adding a slight bit of contrast. The highlights we're actually going to drag down a little bit and off to the right to give them a nice fade. If you press Y on your keyboard, you can see the before and after. As you can see, we got that detail out in the front lip as well as in the grill. And we also reduce those highlights on the food. You can see a little bit more of the interior, but we're also going to work on that a bit. And overall we actually desaturated the image, but it, comparing the two, the colors on the right seem a little bit more vibrant and we haven't even began to adjust those. So moving into the HSL. All right, So under this slider is where we can adjust the hue, saturation, and luminance of every individual color. So even though my car is classified as Kenyan Red metallic, it does have a lot of brown in it, but often the hue is going to be pulling from the reds and oranges and a little bit of the yellows. So what I like to do is naturally in this photo my car looks more red. So I'm going to change the hue to a little bit more red. I'm going to dramatize it so you guys can see what happens with change a few this way it looks more brown. So we're going to add little bit more red to it. Going to do the same thing with the orange slider and see what happens. Okay, as you can see, it's affecting different parts of the car. We're going to try to level that out. About there looks good. Now these are going to vary on the color of your car. Keep that in mind. But this is more of the stylizing side of Adobe Lightroom. We're gonna do the same thing with our yellow, but keep in mind if you're adjusting these things. Usually, oftentimes turn signals on modern cars or yellow, depending. So we're not going to adjust these too crazy. But I can say I liked them more on this side because I think that does a lot to the grass. Let's zoom back out. Yeah, I like them more in the fall color sides. So the greens will make a dramatic difference, especially if you're shooting in an area with a lot of grass and trees, this is where you can really make it look like fall or make an extremely vibrant and almost fairytale like I like to just give this a little soft hint towards the yellow. And then we're gonna go into the saturation because in this image there's really no Och was blues or purples that we're going to be having to manipulate. So we're gonna go into the saturation and we're actually going to go under aqua. Oftentimes, especially when using a polarizer windshield will appear to be extremely cyan or aqua. This is where you can adjust the saturation of those. You can virtually get rid of that if we do the same with the blue up top. Keep in mind, this is going to make the inside of your car look black and white. So obviously don't bring it down the hallway. We're going to add just a little bit more back in here. It's mainly picking up under the blues, but that's where you'll be able to change that. All right, under our luminance, this is where we can adjust the brightness of each individual color. So if we raise our reds, it looks like it's brightening or darkening our shadows on the car. What I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to turn this down just a bit, bringing to the same thing with the orange and see what happens here. Yeah, that looks good so far. I actually, I'm really happy with how this is turning out. So we're moving on under the color grading tab. I'll be honest, I really don't play with these too much. I feel like under the HSL tab and most of my basic adjustments, I'm adding those colors in. Sometimes you want to change them and add some blues to your shadow's. Obviously nothing that dramatic, but you can add tons of different color to specific parts, such as the highlights, shadows, and mid tones. And you can add those colors. And so if you want it more warm in the highlights, you can go for that look under Lens Corrections. This is important to Enable Profile Corrections. Just put in your camera make and your lens if it doesn't pick it up. And also check Remove Chromatic Aberration at something you might not sometimes see in an image, but at sometimes it does exist. It's just always safe to have that checked. Lastly, we're going to be going over some final adjustments before we move on to Photoshop. Up here are some really amazing tools that can actually help you prep for Photoshop. Sometimes you may have larger things in Photoshop that you need to remove. We're going to be removing this and some other things which we could do here in light room. But just to show you also certain things on the car. But down here, for example, if you have these types of things where they're on the bumper or something extremely easy, where it's all consistent color and lighting. If you go up and click spot removal or Q on your keyboard, pull up this little cursor which you can adjust with your brackets and simply just click on it. It'll copy pixels, usually right around the area. And you can hit, Okay? Usually this tool is extremely accurate and it saves you time and there's less things you'll need to do in Photoshop. Also another really useful tool as our graduated filter, especially if you have the sky in your image and in this specific one I don't. It allows you to click and drag with your desired settings. And these are just some random ones. But I'm going to change the temperature just to show you guys what it could do. Obviously up there it made it very blue. This is a really good technique to do if you have a sky in your image. Another really useful tool is the adjustment brush, where you can paint in your settings in that desired area. So for example, if we wanted to tone down this bright spot just a bit. So it doesn't look like I made too much of a difference. But one thing you actually can do, which is nice. You can actually click on your adjustment and change it. This is going to be extremely dramatic, but this is just for the purpose of showing. So overall in Adobe Lightroom, we really took care of bringing out more detail in the image overall, especially in the shadows of the car, and really focusing our attention on the car. That's why we kept the background desaturated and turned a lot of the saturation up on the car. So if you want to keep your photos consistent, what you can always do is create a preset which will just name this, will just name this rabbit Skillshare. So if we go over to another image with a similar exposure, Let's pick a different angle. Looks to be a similar exposure. If we turn, let's, let's adjust our crop a little bit. All right, Now if we just simply click on rabbits Skillshare their preset we just made. See we have a very similar exposure. Keep in mind you also can make adjustments to these filters. But I want to show you an example of what it will look like if you put this preset on an underexposed image. Here it is at the same exposure. Here it is underexposed. Let me show you what it does to an overexposed image. The perfect amount of detail, too little detail. We lost so much detail in the shadows we can hardly see in the interior, the background is dark. It looks like it's about to rain. You can't see the front lip. It's it's very we have barely any detail. Way too much contrast. Still a good look, but it does not show enough detail. Moving on to the over-exposed way too much shadow adjustments. You can like see you in the interior but it's blown out. The grill has no contrast. The front lip doesn't even the top of the bumper. It just n even in the background. The shadows in the background don't exist at all. Looking at this one, look at back there. Let's look back here at just such a difference. These things matter in your images. So always keep in mind that you can make adjustments to these presets. If we were to click on the exposure and just drag this down a little bit, look at that, getting closer to this image. So that's probably the best way to keep your images consistent. You can always make a preset, apply it to every single image, and then go through and make your adjustments and decide on the final images. Let's move into Adobe Photoshop to show you how we can clean up and finalize this image. All right, Here we are in Adobe Photoshop. We're going to be covering here is cleaning up and finalizing our image. So as I said earlier, I mentioned that this thing in the background, which you may have certain things in your background that you want to eliminate. This could have been taken care of in Lightroom, but I'm just going to click on our Lasso tool, trace around it. Decent enough selection, hit Delete on our keyboard and enter for Content Aware Fill. That's if your layer is locked. If not, you can click Edit and go down to content aware fill and do it that way. And then it's a simple control D to de-select. So that was really the only distracting little thing in the background. This is fine because it's a nice leading line for our AI as well as the road, especially where it splits and comes right out the back of the car. And we have a nice good shot upfront showing the whole front of the car looking at the back and you can see the road and the distance. And with this little, these little poles and wire, it really adds a good leading line. So we're not going to take out that. But sometimes you may want to get rid of certain things like if there was some stuff sitting over here, are more things in the background. Just do some simple selections. And if that doesn't work, you always can use the clone stamp tool, which will actually be getting into here. And this really cleans up a lot of the small things on your car. So the clone stamp tool is right over here. What we're gonna do is we're going to zoom in on her image over here. We're gonna go to where there's a lot of paint chips and we're just going to clean these up. We're going to adjust our bracket size down to a nice small, we don't want to go too big. We're going to hold Alt on our keyboard That's cursor will pop up, we will click, and it's going to paste those pixels right over that spot. Now we'll be able to do this all over the car just by making these small selections. And what you wanna do is you always want to go close to keep the colors accurate. You'll want to grab from here and try to patch up that it won't work. You're going to want to go as close as you can. Sometimes you can go right below and you can just capture that little highlight and paste it right where you want it. This tool is super effective. We have this super small spot on the grill. I'm going to show you just how effective this is, just like that gone. So this tool really helps eliminate those little tedious things, a little noticeable things that people are going to notice about the car. And you do want to get rid of certain things. You don't want to manipulate everything but changing the color of the car or anything like that. But getting rid of scratches, dust, any sort of debris on the car is never a bad thing, always something good that you wanna do. Get rid of those distracting things in your images. Another really effective strategy that you can do, and this works extremely well, is in this case, the CPL did a good job. It did cut down a lot of glare, but not all of the reflections. So what you can do here, especially if you're looking at a straight on shot and you can do this for multiple different parts of the car, such as the hood and the roof or whatever might be blown out a little bit, but especially showing reflections is make a selection of that thing. So for example, since we're doing the windshield, I'm actually just going to use the polygon lasso tool to make quick selections, but to be more precise, you can use the pen tool. All right, so once that selection is made, you're going to hit Control C and Control V on your keyboard. Make sure you are selected on your layer. You shouldn't have any other layers. And then what we're gonna do is while we're selected on this new layer, we're going to go over here to the blend mode, and we're going to click Color Burn. Now, this looks extremely goofy. We can toggle this with this little eye. But what we're actually going to adjust is the opacity. We're going to slide this down. We're going to find a nice happy medium. We still want detail in the interior, but now we've added a nice shaded tone to reduce those reflections and the glare just a little bit and add more detail to the interior. So those are all the steps that I pretty much follow in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, I really like to stylize my image and focus on my HSL sliders instead of color grading. And then once I'm happy with my colors and my car is the main focus, don't focus on your background too much, keep the colors there, but really focus on the vehicle. After I do some basic cleaning up in Lightroom, I like to come to Photoshop and really finalize things and take out big distracting things and really fine to my image. That's what's going to separate your photos from the rest. Take that time, take that extra 10, 15 minutes, get familiar with these steps and make them a habit. 7. Recap + Course Project: So in recap, we talked about essential equipment such as a CPL tripod and some versatile lenses. From there, we actually broke down the scouting location process, as well as the best time to shoot and times to avoid shooting cars. Then we brought you guys into the field and showed you a little pre shoot checklist as far as making sure that car is cleaned to save ourselves some time in post-production, and also to take a few minutes and find those detail shots. Those detailed shots are super-important. I promise you, the more you do this, you will see how important those little detail shots are. How many times have you seen a car photographed on the internet, whether it's Instagram, Twitter, et cetera. And you see it in person. And you're like, wow, I did not realize it had these features. You should be the one taking the time to find those features until that car story. We also took a look background and found where we're going to be photographing our car to eliminate distractions in the background and save ourselves some time in the post-production process. From there, we actually shot the car showing you guys all the techniques that I follow on every single automotive shoot I do, as far as taking multiple shots at the same angle from different viewpoints. Up high, I level down low, while also bracketing those exposures. And as you guys saw in Adobe Lightroom during the editing process, how much of a difference that makes and how much that can help you versus just having one exposure and you have this vision in your head and you're not able to bring it to life because the exposure wasn't proper in camera. Those little things go a long way when shooting an entire set of automotive photos. And it really speeds up your editing time. And there's also images that you may find yourself going back to and at least you have those options versus just having one. Then from there we went straight into Adobe Lightroom and broke down our basic editing process, as well as personalizing and stylizing some images. And we showed you what we do in Adobe Photoshop as far as cleaning up and finalizing our images and getting them ready for Instagram portfolios or whatever it is that you're working on. Maybe it's a client's car. And that leads us to our course project. You guys will be submitting your very own finalized automotive photograph. The goal would be to find a car you've never photographed before. So you can and pay attention to those details shots, you want to have access to. Shoot your car, your mom's car, your brother's car, your friend's car. Then from there, edited in light room, finalize it in Photoshop and submit it. Once again, I want to thank every single one of you for tuning into automotive photography one-to-one. This was an absolute blast to make. I really hope you guys took away some valuable tips and tricks that you can apply it to your automotive photography. I cannot wait to see your submitted images and I will see you in my future Skillshare courses.