Can I just tell you that VIS sucks my balls. Their gel coats are shit. Drips everywhere which are a pain in the balls to sand out. AIT which made my bumper was 1000x better quality and cheaper.

And here is the whole we need to plug up. So lets get to work shall we. I thought ahead and got some styrofoam to plug the hole and support the fiberglass. Trimmed it down and jammed it in there.

Once i shaved the foam down and made sure it was sturday I cut a sheet of fiberglass applied some resin to the lip and the soaked the sheet of fiberglas and smoothed it out as best i could. Odd thing was when the resin dried it actually puffed up quite a bit.

Step 1 – Choose the picture. I really like this image for a number of reasons, there’s a foreground, a slight flare coming off the wheels, and the driver is flipping me a peace sign in full drift. What I don’t like is how hazy it is from the driver in front of him putting down some smoke.  The white balance is also pretty bad. That’s what I’d like to tackle first…

Step 2 – Crush the blacks. I open up my “Curves” window and bring the left triangle (blacks or shadows point) and snug it up against the edge of the histogram. The histogram is a mathematical graph showing the amount of pixels in the shadow, midtone and highlight range of your photo. In your Curves Window you’ll see it as a background to the curves graph. For starters I just like to snug it up a bit, get my shadows in shadow and my highlights bright.

Step 3 – Color Balancing the Shadows. Since my highlights are definitely bright, I move on. In the above image it’s pretty obvious there’s a huge blue cast to the shadows of my image. You find this a lot when shooting drifitng as the smoke is pretty blue in hue. I open up the “Color Balance” window and goto the shadows section. I adjust my sliders to balance away from the blue and teal hues to give a better cast of color to the image. You’ll notice the paint is much greener in the below image. Take a look at the smoke coming off the rear wheel, it’s green/blue in hue. That brings us to the next step…

Step 4 – Color Balance the Highlights. The shadows are close to where I’d like them, now to bring the highlights around. They are obviously blue/green in hue in the above image so I know where my sliders need to go. I focus on the rear wheel of the car because I find it to be a focal point of the image where there is a strong presence of white (highlights). I try to get it close to pure white perceptually, but I tend to lean towards a warm tone in my photos (redish/yellow). You’ll notice it in the skin tones of the hand and on the shine on the paint, it’s very warm. The image still needs some “pop” though…

Step 5 – Blacks Again. To get some more pop, I open up my “Curves” window and pull in the shadows more. Getting rid of most of the haze in the image and really giving the paint a dark tone. I would consider this a decently balanced image, now I want to experiment.

Step 6 – The Channel Mixer. There’s way too much color in the above image for my tastes. It all sort of blends and fights for attention. One of my favorite methods to bring down some of the saturation of an image is to use the Channel Mixer. I start by creating a new Adjustment Layer (that way I don’t alter the original image, I use Adjustment Layers for nearly all my adjustments) using the small icon on the bottom of the layers window. I select the Channel Mixer… option. A new window opens up and I use the drop down menu to cycle through the different filters of the channel mixer. What this is doing is converting your image to black and white, but in a much more dynamic way than a simple desaturation. It gives you the option to choose which channel the black and white should go through (or something?). I used the “Black & White with Orange Filter” option because it really made my favorite parts of the image POP. The haybales, the wheels, the hand. Now to bring some color back in…

Step 7 – Shadows and Highlights. This is a little trick I learned through experimentation. I  create a duplicate layer of the original image (unmodified because I’ve been using adjustment layers so far) and move it above the Channel Mixer adjustment layer. I then use Image > Adjustments > Shadow Highlights… In that window I slide the “amount” slider to 100% and the midtone contrast until I find a middle ground between too contrasty and too flat. The result is pretty ugly, flat and desaturated. But…

Step 8 – Blending Modes. Depending on the image and the result I’m looking for, I’ll change the blending mode of the duplicate layer (the one I just created). Sometimes I’ll use the “Color” blending mode, or the “Vivid Light” blending mode. This time I used Overlay to get the “bleach bypass” look out of my image. It gives it a sort of World War II color and highlight look. Really washed out highlights and muted colors in the midtones.

Step 9 – Sponge Tool. To get a little more pop out of some of the key features of the image I wanted to bring a little more color back in. I use the sponge tool, set to “saturate” and flow 11%, to bring back some of the color on the arm, stickers and flares. As a side effect of the shadow highlights, though, the top of my haybales look funky and grey while the sides are blindingly oversaturated.

Step 10 – More Sponge. Using both the Saturate and Desaturate options on the Sponge Tool, I try to balance out the haybale in the foreground. I also bring back a little green on the car so it doesn’t get lost behind the bright orange of the haybales.

Step 11 – Accenting the Glare. I notice there’s a slight sun glare on top of my image, near the roof line. I like it but I wish it was more pronounced. Sometimes you have to create something that isn’t there to reach a desired effect. I use the Gradient Tool set to “Radial Gradient” (circular). My gradient goes from white to transparent. I create a new layer, on top, and drag the tool to create the image below. Obviously this looks like crap but with the help of blending modes…

Step 12 – Blending Mode. It’s subtle. Almost indiscernable. I set my layer blending mode to Soft Light and transparency to 25% in the layers window. The result is a small increase in the strength of the glare already present in my image.

The result isn’t perfect, but I’m pleased with it.