How To Change Your Car's Color

[ARdoller]

Here's a tutorial showing you a few ways to change the color of your car's body. These techniques can also be used to change wheel colors, and tint windows, and can be used in conjunction with some of the other tutorials on this site. Lets get started. First were going to need a nice clear picture of your car. Here's mine. Now, before you can start changing the colors around, we need to identify what areas are going to be changed. start by using the Polygonal Lasso tool and making a general selection of the body. Here, I selected the body, and left anything completely surrounded by body panels selected. Stuff like the left headlight and left side mirror, I did not select because they're not inside the body's boundaries. Now, you want to copy the selected area to a new layer. Now that you have the selected area on a new layer, we are going to go ahead and Desaturate the layer to show what we have selected and what is not selected. Press Ctrl + Shift + U to desaturate the layer. Now that the layer is desaturated, we can go back and start deleting items that are going to remain their original color, like the right headlight, and windshield. Here is a complete list of everything i deleted on the new layer in this picture, to show you what you should look out for. Its good to have a good eye to pick out small details that we dont want to change color. [ul][*]Windshield (and windshield wipers)[*]Driver's side window and driver's side mirror (kept spoiler on new layer)[*]Grille (Pony & Empty area behind pony)[*]Lower grille[*]Fog lamp holes[*]Black area inside side scoop[*]Fender emblem[*]Door key hole[/ul]Ok, now that you have everything deleted that you want to keep their current color, we want to take one quick minute to select one more area now for later. Notice how you can see the spoiler in the window and windshield. I already had left the spoiler in the new layer when deleting the drivers side window, but the part of the spoiler in the windshield was deleted. We want to go back and use the Polygonal Lasso tool to reselect the spoiler in the windshield. Make sure youre on the first layer (the original picture) and copy the slected spoiler to a new layer. We will leave this alone for now and come back to it. Now, there are many different ways to change the color of your car. I am going to go through the most common. The first way is to use the Hue/Saturation tool. This is the easiest way to change colors. To do so, you need to go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. The Hue/Saturation menu will pop up and you can adjust your car's color with the Hue setting, and mess with its saturation with the Saturation setting. Make sure you click the Colorize box in the bottom right corner, or your colors will be very limited. Another way to change colors, is to use the Color Balance menu. This way is a bit more complicated, but the range of colors you have to choose from are much greater. Go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance and the Color Balance menu will open up. Now you can adjust the sliders to the color you would like, and you can switch between Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights (at the bottom of the window) for even greater control of your colors. The next way is with the Curves window. The Curves menu isnt ideal for creating colors with hue to them, but rather making black and white colors, like greys, whites, silvers, and blacks. To get to the Curves window, go to Image > Adjustments > Curves. I used the RGB setting, and selected the middle of the graph and dragged down on the line to lower the brightness of the layer. If you wanted to do a silver color, silvers have a blueish tint to them, they are not 100% gray. The Curves window is a perfect way to add the blue necessary to make a realistic silver. Just change the RGB drop box to Blue, and raise the line in the graph very slightly and you will start to notice a blue hue appear in the image. Remember though, too much blue will also make for an unrealistic silver too. Another way would be to select the layer with the desaturated body, and select just the areas that are actually part of the layer. To do so, if you hold the Ctrl button, and click the Thumbnail Image in the Layers Palette for the body layer then you will automatically select all the car's body areas. Now you want to make a new layer (layer button is next to the trash can in the Layers Palette). While everything is still selected, use the Brush Tool and select the color you would like and start using a brush to fill the selected areas. When you have all the areas filled, you want to start to mess with the blending of the layer. You can change the Opacity to make the layer below appear. I changed the Blending Mode (drop box next to the Opacity slider in the Layers Palette) to Hard Light to make the layer "hug" the layer below. I find this method to be the least realistic in this case, but in some cases if you blend the layer correctly and repeat those steps with multiple layers on different blending modes, and even conjoin it with some of the other color changing methods, you can make just about any color look realistic. Now that the car's body color is changed, we now want to go back to the layer with the spoiler on it, and make that the same color. Select the spoiler's layer, and adjust the color using whatever method above you used to make it match the rest of the car. Since the spoiler is behind the windshield in this picture, I lowered the opacity of the layer so it would appear behind the windshield. And you have now finished changing the color of your car.

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