Caught in the Chrome

[Dizzy]

Our little town had the annual "Cascade Days" parade and car show yesterday; it was also the hottest day of the year to date. Very little shade was available around the classic cars, shiny hot rods and roadsters, so the reflections were somewhat unavoidable in the bright sunlight and vast quantities of well polished chrome:



There were some real challenges [for me] in the processing, as the image was produced from this photo of the entire front of the vehicle. The grill was the biggest challenge, but had a great time working late into the wee hours and ultimately sorting it all out.

Comments and suggestions always appreciated...

Mike

[Dave Humphries]

That's some crop Mike, but you seem to have pulled it off.

My only comment would be that the black and blue borders are way too wide, and they also appear to be equal and that looks odd (for my taste).

Was there a reason for the V-shape on the radiator? - that may be a daft question - just imagining it parallel, without the top or bottm in view, would probably look peculiar.

[Dizzy]

That's some crop Mike, but you seem to have pulled it off.
My only comment would be that the black and blue borders are way too wide, and they also appear to be equal and that looks odd (for my taste).
Was there a reason for the V-shape on the radiator? - that may be a daft question - just imagining it parallel, without the top or bottom in view, would probably look peculiar.

Hi Dave,

Re-posted the image without any border. I've been playing around some with borders, and the only way I have to make them at the moment is to create a single color background in Paint, save it as a .jpg, and then copy/paste the image on top. I then crop the background to make the border. The car was the light blue color, but I must agree it was way to wide, and did detracted from the whole image.

Attached a pic of the grill as it was in the original. What I did was chop off both ends (equally), remove all the middle and then slid them back together. This gave a very ugly looking grill area that was all slanted to one side or the other. I'm one of those odd ducks that likes everything to be very uniform, so I chopped off half the grill area in the reduced composition, swapped sides on it horizontally in Image Composer, and then pasted it back in. This created most of the "V". The right side had to have a cloned section added in one bit at a time to give it a clean line up the radiator cores, and I finished by cloning in a straight section of line down the middle of the "V" to make it all uniform.

This was really more of a fun exercise just to see if I could make it work. The artistic side of the processing is all so new to me, and even though it's not a prize winner, I'm very pleased with the results (odd as it is..lol).

Thank you for sharing your thoughts..

Mike

[JohnC]

Nice one,Mike...and there you are in the reflection.

[Dizzy]

Nice one, Mike...and there you are in the reflection.

Thanks John! Yeah..that's what got me to thinking about creating the image, as the curve of the chrome makes it appear as if I'm shooting the front end from two different angles. Still using only the Nikon Nx2 for processing all the colors, sharpening, contrast etc., and also for converting from .NEF to .jpg. The Nx2 is a free download copy from Nikon, so it has only limited abilities. After the image is converted, the remaining details and touch-up is accomplished inMicrosoft Image Composer, Office Picture Manager and Paint . Pretty poor line-up of software, but no real worries about it as I'm having a great time with it.

The wife was a bit worried that once the Lightroom 3 arrives I'll never leave my desk again. She now realizes that was not actually a valid concern; sooner or later I'll run out of images to process, and there will be no other option but to go out and shoot some more...

Mike