Lamborghini Aventador Shoot

To edit the picture I firstly placed it into Adobe Lighroom and began to manipulate the photo, playing with many elements such as the exposure and luminance.
Straight away, it is obvious that the highlights and shadows of the image need to be heavily adjusted. The wheels have no clarity to them and they blend in as such to the floor. Also, I wanted to get rid of the orange tint that the image holds. I feel it makes the image too warm and friendly looking - I wanted to create an image that has a chilling, piercing feel to it.

To take the tint out of the image I changed the temperature of the image, initially giving it a bluer look to it, making it look colder straight away. To level out the shadows and the blacks in the image, I turned the shadows up to +70 which made the image appear very hazy and artificial. To balance this out I put the blacks down to -30 which darkened out areas of the shadows making it appear natural but lighter than it was before. I played with the luminance of the image to make the colors much darker (whilst not loosing any saturation) making items like the glass on the car (aqua) appear see through and as though there is no light hitting them and reflecting off them.

The result of my Lightroom editing made my photo look HDR almost, but has really changed the dynamics of the photo and it has already started to give it a chilling feel. My next plan is to put the image into Photoshop and break down the photo into foreground, mid-ground and background and begin to adjust them separately. The main element I want to change is the clouds, at the moment they are too white and fluffy - I need them much more sinister looking, as if a huge storm was about to hit.

The first step I took in Photoshop was making the photo colder. One second inspection I found that the image was still rather orange. Yet in Photoshop I could change the curves of Red Green & Blue individually, allowing me to create the exact shade that I want for the tone of the image.

I then decided that the background of the image needed to be blurred more. This would make it appear as though the car is in a much clearer focus and it would stand out more. To select around the car I used the lasso tool and drew around the car. To get the line smooth I simply zoomed in to the maximum amount and drew round it very slowly. I Could have used the magnetic lasso tool, however I feel as though I do not have enough control over it and is better to free hand it.

My next task was to make the clouds darker. This was a fairly easy process if I am honest. All I needed to go was make a copy of the original layer and change the layer mode to 'overlay'. This immediately made the image a whole lot darker and made the clouds severely darker.

The only problem with this was that it made the clouds way too dark and made them look almost oil painting like. Again an easy fix as all I needed to do was put the opacity of the layer down.

As you may see, I have many different layers. All this is, is allowing me to add different qualities to different areas of the sky. So for example say, if one part of the sky came out really well by having an overlay later at 28%, but the section to the left was either too light or too dark, by putting that area on a new layer, I can give it it's own attributes.

To complete my image, I cropped it using a rule of thirds grid. This made me crop the image so that the car was positioned in the cross over points in the grid. This would mean that the viewers eye would get immediately drawn toward the car which is the subject of the photo.

I was now satisfied with what I had created and felt as though my image was ready to be submitted as my final piece.