So back in May I decided to go down to Main Street, the city of Wauchula were having a monthly event were they have organized activities and entertainment for everyone.  On this particular evening they were having a motorcycle show, and wouldn’t you know it a friend of mine took first place with his custom chopper!  He asked me to take some shots of it.  I took about a dozen shots from different angles and left, when I downloaded them they all shared a similar quality they all looked like poo!  The motorcycle looked good but the background was horrible!  So I finally got around to photoshoping it, below is the end result hit the ‘Read more” Link to see how I did it and to see what it looked like before.

So the image above is looks pretty good but I the image didn’t have a whole lot going for it from the start!  The image was slightly overexposed, their were virtually no clouds and the background was horrendous!  So I started out with my clone stamp tool and I also used the patch tool in photoshop for the larger areas.  Once I had got rid of the nasty background I had planned on clone stamping what little clouds were left and creating some.  A side note: removing the background was technically unnecessary and it would have saved me a lot of time in making this image but I didn’t intend to replace the sky at first.

But I just didn’t like the look it gave me.  So I started looking through all the images I had taken of landscapes with “good” cloud definition.  I then came across the shot pictured below and used in the final image, I shot this about three years ago when I was first getting started in photography. Taken off my back porch in the end of the day simple, boring shot but yet I kept it for some reason.

So I imported the image into photoshop and placed it on its on layer below the motorcycle shot with the sky removed, and changed the blend mode to “Soft Light”  which adds a punch of contrast to the shot and really brought out the flames in the paint job, but it also made it easier to use a layer mask for the bike because when you use soft light it sort of lowers the opacity of that layer so I could see what I was masking.

That basically sums up what it took to create this image, I know some of this sounds confusing to some of my readers but my photography coleauges will get the confusing bits.  So in a nutshell I simply replaced the background in the image using Adobe Photoshop by placing the sky image over the original motorcycle image and “masking” over the part of the sky image where motorcycle is  and the ground/asphalt.  I have placed several images below starting with the original image straight out of the camera finishing with the final image above.  Enjoy!

-Alex

Tags: chopper, clone, clouds, flames, gibson, highway, Motorcycle, Photoshop, sunset