Adding Motion to a Car
Sunday, December 17th, 2006This tutorial will teach you how to add motion to a stationary car. Here is the outcome I will be showing you:
Ok, now let’s start from the beginning. Here’s the starting image I will be using:
1. The first thing we need to do it to crop out the car. The easiest way to do this is to use the pen tool. I won’t be explaining how to use the pen tool so please look at the one here on this site or anywhere else (there’s a lot of them out there).
Anyway, using the pen tool, make a selection of the car, including the wheels, but without the shadow:
Make sure this selection is accurate - zoom in as much as you can to ensure this.
2. Once you have closed the pen tool path. Right-click the mask and select ‘Make Selection’:
In the next window, add a little feather to the selection as shown below:
3. Now that the car is selected. Select the Marquee Tool, and then right-click the selection of the car and pick ‘Layer via Cut’.
4. Now in order to add motion to the background correctly, we need to fake the background that we just removed from the car. To do this, we will be using the Clone Stamp tool.
Firstly, remove the visibility of the car layer, then select the Clone Stamp tool.
(Once again, if you don’t know how to use the Clone Stamp tool, please search for some tutorials, I’m sure they’re easy to find). Use a fairly large brush size and try to clone as much of the missing background as you can. You don’t have to get too fancy retouching the background, as you are going to blur it anyway, which will hide any brushing you may do.
Here’s the result of my clone stamping (as I said, it doesn’t have to be too fancy):
5. Now make the car layer visible again so we know what we’re doing while blurring the background. Select the background layer and go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Add a fair amount of blur and make sure it’s following the direction of the car:
You could say the motion effect is now completed, but if this were a more detailed image we would need to do some more touch-ups to this image, and I will be demonstrating these on the same image.
6. Because the foreground is visually closer, the amount of blur will be more in the foreground. Add less to the background of the image the farther away it is. To do this, you could simple use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select the foreground part of the image and then copy the selection:
Now, on the duplicated layer, once again add some more motion blur:
7. To blend this extra blur more into the original image, hold down CTRL and click on the thumbnail of the foreground layer, this will make an automatic selection of the layer. Right-click the selection and pick ‘Select Inverse’:
Right-click the selection again and select ‘Feather’:
Then hit DEL a few times to erase the edge of the layer.
8. A nice extra effect to add is a small ‘ghost trail’ to the car. This can be done quite easily. Firstly select the car layer and duplicate it, and then (on the original car layer) go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur to add a small amount of motion blur to the car.
Now the problem with this is that there’s some blur at the front of the car which wouldn’t make sense if the car is moving forward. To fix this, simply use the Eraser tool with a very soft brush, and erase the blur at the front parts of the car:
9. Another important effect to add to make the motion more realistic is to add motion to the wheels. This can be done using the Radial Blur filter.
Firstly, select the duplicated car layer and then using the Circular Marquee tool, hold down SHIFT and make a selection of the first wheel (move the selection into the correct position):
With the wheel still selected, go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur:
Repeat this step with the second wheel, and you should get a nice result where the wheels actually look like they’re moving:
Done. You should now have a car that realistically looks like it’s in motion:
This tutorial is © Copyright 2006 TutorialMad.com All Rights Reserved.
