post processing silver cars

[Andrew Szatkowski]

hey guys could use some help...i have a silver car and i need some help getting that "pop" out. i've shot other colored cars and dont seem to need much post processing to get that effect. the pics of the silver always seem to be very flat and bland. now, i dont want to get into shooting techniques (save that for the other forum). I find myself now taking solely evening/night shots because of this. i have been messing around with "already there" light (street lights, building lights, natural light) to get some nice shadow effects to bring out the curves of my car (infiitni g35 coupe) and i also tend to get some better colors out of the paint to make it pop.
so...
speaking of late afternoon/evening shots with nothing but natural sunset light--what post processing techniques could you recommend to get a nice "pop" out of my silver car.
ps: i have photoshop cs2 and do not have mcuh experience with it. i tend to be on the "get a great shot out of the camera" mindset....but i've realized that even the best shots could use some help. i've also been shooting in raw which does seem to help a bit (cs2 version)
thanks in advance

it actually took a while to find an example of what i'm talking about because i normally just delete them. but i dug bag from 2 years ago and found this (one of my first pics of the new car at the time) clearly not a great picture by any standards but its a good example of what i'm speaking of. sorry its kinda grainy (from my old sony point and shoot)
and feel free to work on this pic to show me your skills!

http://static.flickr.com/77/195071714_919bb51c57_b.jpg

[Daniel Buck]

a bit of contrast maybe? If you wanted the car to pop out some more, you could darken the background even more, or maybe warm up the background a tad so that the cool silver shows through a bit more.

You could also go in and start airbrushing more contrast along the 'sholder line" to make that part of the car pop real nice.

(this may be to dark, I think my monitors are a bit bright)


http://www.danielbuck.net/wip/infinity_01.jpg

[John Thawley]

I had a silver car... it always photographed like gray primer. Just today I raised the same point shooting the new Audi R10 prototype cars... the silver unfortunatley reflects what's around it, and ends up looking dull.

http://gallery.johnthawley.com/albums/albuq05/acj.jpg

[Daniel Buck]

silver ends up doing that because of the heavy metalic base I think, and you cant give it to much contrast without blowing out the highlights already (silver highlights already tend to blow out easy!). Silver (along with black) are the hardest colors to photograph in my opinion, black because it's so dark, and silver because of how easily the highlights blow out when the rest of the car is still quite a bit darker. Well, silver is hard in direct sun that is, in partly cloudy or 'magic hour" after the sun dips down, silver isn't as hard.

John, your picture of the silver car with yellow on top illustrats what I'm talking about quite well! Notice how the yellow just bearly clips to 255? (and it might not actually even clip!) and then see how many times the silver clips. The rest of the silver looks even darker than the yellow, but it's highlights clip easily. great example :-)

[Andrew Szatkowski]

thanks guys....
everything you're saying is exactly what i've been having problems with.
yeah that first pic def. needs darkening. sorry such a bad overall shot but a good example of the flatness.
john you said it best-- looks like grey primer. i'll keep working on it!

here is an example of what i've been doing recently to try and overcome the "grey primer" look.
woops...already getting off track: this isn't really cs2'd. just simple raw adjustments, but oh well.
http://static.flickr.com/51/188500885_7403e56cf8_b.jpg

[Daniel Buck]

the mix of warm and cool on the silver really helps I think.

[Jason Tang]

I took this image the other day. I mainly fiddled around with the color balance, levels, curve settings and the shadowing to get the result. Is this the "pop" you were hoping to get?

http://jasontang.virtuality.org/albums/bmwporscheunderground/underground11.sized.jpg

[Ramon Lopez]

Here's a shot of my friend's silver Jetta.

What I ended up doing was processing the RAW a couple of times for the highlights and the shadows, then put them as layers and masked away to make sure things didn't get too blown out.

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/8669/jetta19sv2pq9.jpg

My monitor is in desperate need of calibration, so this may be too bright/dark.

[Britt McTammany]

Send me a high res and I will check it out to see what I can do in CS2. If I have any luck I can walk you through my workflow.