Photography Tip - selecting and cloning a clean Ferrari 458 Italia
Friday, April 22, 2011 at 4:11PM Jason Collin 
2011 Ferrari 458 Italia at a car show in St. Petersburg Florida
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Car shows are great places to see a large number of awesome cars in a small space. However, that small space and numerous other car fans walking around create a nearly impossible situation for photographing the cars in full. Detail shots are usually what I focus on, but still I want to have at least a few full car shots as well. Some of you may know that the Ferrari 458 Italia is my current favorite car in the world. At a recent St. Petersburg, Florida car show I had a chance to talk with the owners of the above 458 Italia who were very nice people. I photographed their Ferrari at length.
I could not get a shot like I wanted to while there due to other cars being parked so close to the 458 Italia and of course because of many other people coming to peek at Ferrari's latest mid-engine super car. So I had to settle for the best angle I could get taking into account the sun's position and just the space I had to shoot in. Photoshop CS5 helped with the rest.
Too clone out things from complex surroundings, quick select them then clone stamp in safetyIn the above screen shot you can see how I first used the Quick Select Tool (W) to put a protective fence around the objects I wanted to remove (silver car, people, etc). I do this because the Clone Stamp Tool (S) is very temperamental and very hard to use along a distinct edge like the front fender of the red Ferrari and the silver Ferrari. Basically, containing the unwanted object in a quick select field allows me to not worry about coloring outside the lines, so to speak. You can see I selected some grass from the foreground and already started stamping it onto the silver Ferrari. The sharp edge of the red Ferrari fender will remain perfectly intact.
Likewise for the people above the red Ferrari. I will clone some of the trees and stamp them on top of the people to complete the illusion that the Ferrari 458 Italia is alone in a field. To close the quick select areas hit CMD-M (on a Mac).
Using this quick select and cloning method will allow you to cleanly and easily remove objects from complex surroundings.
Reader Comments (2)
Some impressive digital editing! Except for that one bit in front of the car I'd say it was almost perfect. How long did this take you?
Thanks Can.....yeah, the part in front of the car I realized was going to be a problem when I saw there was no actual horizon to clone from, so I just had to have trees meet grass trying to make the pattern a bit irregular so it did not look like a dead straight line. I might have taken more time on that one part to make it look less blurry.
The whole edit, including my usual color correction, etc I would say took less than 15 minutes. I kept going back and taking more out. Originally I left the tower and the palm tree over the center of the roof, then I thought the tower just distracts too as the rest of the background is just nature, and the palm tree over the roof breaks the curved line of the roof.
Then I realized I didn't delete the reflections in the window and did that.
Is this a similar technique (quick selecting then cloning) that you would have used to accomplish the same thing or have you learned at graphic design school another (better) way?
I will post a full spread of Ferrari 458 Italia photos soon as well as a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport.