Check Out My Best: Power to the Pavement 1/17/06

Kenny, you've inspired me a lot on the subject of where I should take pictures, I always thought the rally tracks were low res but now I'll give it a go, check it out tonight!;)

The orange fenced pic is the best and most unique.
 
German Muscle
bump, do a VW Rabbit GTI
Click to expand...

VW Rabbit GTI - New York





Tesla's Ray Gun Protecting a NY Tower



This combo was particularly hard to get good shots without ugly multiple shade/reflection lines on the car. I had to ditch a few otherwise great shots because of this, however some of them I was able to save with extensive and careful blurring. This isn't even taking into account the crappy quality of the background on New York.

All pics except the ray gun are edited, but not much heavy work done to these pictures, either - the same type of things I did to the Delta ones, except with a bit more glow and saturation.

Hope you like them German Muscle (and everyone else)
Which do you like best?


By the way thanks everyone who liked my rally shots! I'm glad they came out well.
 
A/C Cobra 427 & Renault 5 Turbo - Citta di Aria







In A League All By Itself



I still went for realism for most of these, although my style adapted a bit for this set. I was much more generous in my use of glow and these pics are a little brighter. Also I experimented with some graduated tints. Of course I still did the normal things I do in Picasa. It was interesting because I could not adjust the color temperature very much in either direction because red and blue are sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum - so saturation was helpful but there's a limit to how much you can do.

However the most time-consuming aspect was that I manually had to smudge/blur in MS Photo Editor all the jaggies in the close-up pics. In fact, I spent about an hour on some pictures cleaning up what PD should have done right the first time. So - when you look at each image, please view it full size and ask yourself, "What am I generally not seeing? Oh - nasty jaggies." I put a LOT of time into making some of these as perfect as I can, down to manipulating the color of each pixel in a critical area. If you look super closely you can probably tell where I did my blurring.

These pics were taken for Swissbear's Rally Comp Week 10 and then I started taking pics of just the Cobra :dopey:
Yes, that's how much of a backlog I have.

This may be my best work. Do you agree? Please give me some input.
 
That 6th pic looks incredibly real...like something you'd see at a nostalgia car race. Well...other than the front wheel being somewhat buried in the ground, but nothing you can do about that, and the rest of the picture is stunning :) Also very nice work on the closeups, it's all very nice-looking :)
 
6th colour is most realistic ... 7th is pretty good as well
looks like your are experiencing gradient overlay
nice try ~
 
Thanks everyone for commenting, I really appreciate it. :)

Franz - Yes I started experimenting with horizontal tint in Picasa for this update.

Sejtur - there are no Shelbys in my last update :dunce: It's an A/C Cobra 427, the original British version of the car that the Shelby is based off. The first ones by A/C weren't even much of a powerful car at all if I remember.

Mclaren - The AI gave me no trouble at all. The first lap I just kinda hung around him to make interesting pictures with 2 cars in it instead of just me pulling away. Then on the second lap, bam I shot out like the hustler I am and pulled away from the Renault like his turbo became filled with lead. At the end of the lap I pulled over to the side and turned around, and parked myself right next to the finish line. There is only one racing line on this track to navigate through the barriers so he had no choice but to push me across for the win.

Hence, picture 19 and the ones around it (this also explains why my Cobra is in focus and the Renault isn't). Here is another version of #19.....I took it and made it black and white. Then, I adjusted the brightness and contrast to make the black squares more noticeable. Then... I carefully copy/pasted the color parts from Picture 19 that I wanted like the two cars and the wall. I did this through MS Photo Editor, so I had to do this by selecting an area in the form of rectangles. Finally I blurred out the tinted areas that bled in to the black and white squares - you can still see some yellow.


Winners Circle

 
Hey kennythebomb, very very nice update. I'm loving the A/C. Its color comes out well with what you've done to it.
Great work. Keep it up. 👍
 
Wow...I finally made my through your gallery....I have to say I am uber-impressed...

The thing I like more than a "realistic" shot is the different styles you play with...I love the different uses of colours vs. tracks, etc...the whole George V night set was unreal...I also loved the set of Yellow Bird rippin' around Grand Valley...


Big Big Thumbs Up...and I will definitely be tuning in much more often!

I can't really explain it...but this was my fave....

 

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