Fine Tuning Cars

I recently shot a series of US Muscle cars for Performax International, Performax imports directly from the US and converts them to right hand drive in their state of the art facility in Qld. The technology behind this conversion is amazing and the result is as good if not better than what they produce in the US factory, they are completely reversed engineered for this market.

The requirement was to shoot them in a studio on a cycloramic white background and for use as either square finished images or so they could be deep etched and dropped onto appropriate backgrounds as the distributors saw fit.










In pre- production planning with the client we recommended that in this process we should ensure that any deep etch use of the images should reflect a realistic treatment of the windows when dropped over other back grounds. Glass is both transparent and reflective we want to see through it and we expect to see reflections on it. To enable this in post production we created an alpha channel mask to ensure the windows had both properties.

This is an example of the mask, the black allows complete transparency so it will show all of the background image the grey areas where the windows are show the semi transparent areas and the clear is obviously the body of the car.

This is a great example of the end result, the background is seen through the windows but not as clearly as the background behind the car and the reflections on the windscreen are still visible.

The main purpose of this is to really ensure that the clients product is always being shown to its best potential, while the initial brief was shoot for deep etch an experienced professional should always add value through advise, demonstrating options when required. For anyone dealing with this image in the future it is now only a one step option to get this result.

More shots of the Corvette ZR1