Realistic Shadow Tutorial / Walkthrough
I noticed that a few people around the forums were having a little trouble doing shadows. I decided to put this little walkthrough together while I was changing the background for my All Stars comp chop. Remember guys this is just a general idea of how I do it and hopefully something you may be able to take a few ideas from 
Step 1: I had to clean out the ground underneath the car as the donor background had a car sitting in completely the wrong angle so none of the original shadow was useful (often this is not the case however). The result is something like this.... it doesn't matter if it's messy as most of the errors will be masked by the shadow in the end.
Step 2: Create a basic soft shadow around the car. This is the general step that I take in nearly all chops no matter what lighting conditions there are. I did this by pen-tooling an area underneath the car where light wouldn't normally reach and then selecting it with a feather of 90px (this is because my canvas is 5000x3000px - if you're using a smaller canvas then less feather is neccessary). I then went the the layer of the background and copied and pasted the selected area. Using this layer I went to brightness/contrast and lowered the brightness and slightly increased the contrast.
Although this technique may seem a bit long winded compared with just filling the selection with black colour, I believe it gives more realistic shadowing than the former. Alternatively you may like to fill the selection with black and try out several different blending modes such as overlay or soft light. As you can tell, it's a bit of trial an error (there is no hard and fast rule for chopping).
The result is as follows:
Step: 3To get a nice even gradient in the shadowing I then selected the areas of the undercar shadow where the ground would be even darker (meaning very little light would be entering under there). This is mainly futher underneath the car and also right under the tires. Using the same technique I then copy and pasted this area from the original background (using less feather of 40px) and darkened with the brightness/contrast feature.
As you can see now, the shadow is starting to take a little more form:
Step 4: Because there are so many different light sources in an underground car park like this, it's necessary to add even further shadow underneath the car. This time I decided the technique of filling a selection with black would look best. What I did was make a selection (15px feather) of the area underneath the car where absolutely no light would enter and then on a new layer filled it with black and lowered the opacity to about 60%.
The result is something like this:
Step 5: Finally I added some finishing touches, including some minor extra penumbral shadows that would be possible from various lights in the car park. Here is the somewhat final outcome of the shadow (although it is likely to change as I add body parts to the chop).
Step 1: I had to clean out the ground underneath the car as the donor background had a car sitting in completely the wrong angle so none of the original shadow was useful (often this is not the case however). The result is something like this.... it doesn't matter if it's messy as most of the errors will be masked by the shadow in the end.
Step 2: Create a basic soft shadow around the car. This is the general step that I take in nearly all chops no matter what lighting conditions there are. I did this by pen-tooling an area underneath the car where light wouldn't normally reach and then selecting it with a feather of 90px (this is because my canvas is 5000x3000px - if you're using a smaller canvas then less feather is neccessary). I then went the the layer of the background and copied and pasted the selected area. Using this layer I went to brightness/contrast and lowered the brightness and slightly increased the contrast.
Although this technique may seem a bit long winded compared with just filling the selection with black colour, I believe it gives more realistic shadowing than the former. Alternatively you may like to fill the selection with black and try out several different blending modes such as overlay or soft light. As you can tell, it's a bit of trial an error (there is no hard and fast rule for chopping).
The result is as follows:
Step: 3To get a nice even gradient in the shadowing I then selected the areas of the undercar shadow where the ground would be even darker (meaning very little light would be entering under there). This is mainly futher underneath the car and also right under the tires. Using the same technique I then copy and pasted this area from the original background (using less feather of 40px) and darkened with the brightness/contrast feature.
As you can see now, the shadow is starting to take a little more form:
Step 4: Because there are so many different light sources in an underground car park like this, it's necessary to add even further shadow underneath the car. This time I decided the technique of filling a selection with black would look best. What I did was make a selection (15px feather) of the area underneath the car where absolutely no light would enter and then on a new layer filled it with black and lowered the opacity to about 60%.
The result is something like this:
Step 5: Finally I added some finishing touches, including some minor extra penumbral shadows that would be possible from various lights in the car park. Here is the somewhat final outcome of the shadow (although it is likely to change as I add body parts to the chop).
puszka321 wrote:
please video 
MK211 wrote:
I really like the nos coming out of the rims
