Ermac26
nice job...really enjoying all the pics you have here
once I get a USB Flash drive, I'll start posting pics for all to see...I'm just too poor right now

and maybe people can give me tips to make my pics more interesting too
Thanks!
Yeah I've been there too, just waiting to post up your pictures and see the comment
When shooting pictures, dont be affraid to use weard-looking-angles, as long as it looks interesting, and you show an editing style or a photo composition style that is unique and attracts attention, you're all settled.
Trying to achieve it with editing AND composition is best, so composition ( how you take a picture, at wich angle and stuff) is half the work
If you start making pictures, try to start immediatly with photoshop or any other image editing programm. If you have photoshop like I do, go to image-->adjustments-->levels. Offcourse if you use photoshop for the first time it looks complicated, and all the black bars stuff and numbers you dont know anything of...
Well only thing I know, is that you just need to move the white, gray and the black tiney triangles at the bottom. If you do it well you can get pretty far with levels alone. It's pretty simple.
Remember photoshop doesn't have any sort of selfdestruct button

Some things just look more complicated than others, and I dont even use the real complicated stuff. Mess around a bit, and if you find a cool effect, try to think how you could use it in a subtle way. Sure, you can alter images till they're completely different, but if you want to be good you must be modest
I just type these things automatically once I see someone's new, lol.
So if you get an USB drive, I hope this is usefull
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For when you are a bit familiar with photoshop, I generally start with a picture from GT4:
-Go to photoshop go to "file-->open...", go to "My Computer" and go to your "removable disk". Make sure you got you're USB plugged in offcourse

Then go to the GT4 folder, and open up your picture.
-Go to image--> Zoom in twice, cause photoshop will automatically zoom out twice. If you zoom in again you will see how the real pic will show up, including how large it will appear on the screen once uploaded and stuff. It's far too big, yes. Go to image size and type in at "width:", 600 pixels size. The length will automatically change to 450 or something like it. See, thats better isn't it

You can also choose for 800 pixels as width or something like it. With 600*450 it should be exactly the size as it was when you first opened the pic, even before you began to zoom in.
Like this:
-Get the colors right, wich means:
*Get the gradient type "foreground to transparant* in the bar to the left, and add some white gradient at 15% opacity in the background and foreground parts of the picture, going from one corner tip to the middle usually.
Like this:
*Either go to image-->adjustments-->contrast and brightness, and set brightness up with...usually 35.
Like this:
*Or go to image-->adjustmens-->levels first, drag the white triangle a bit to the left, and the gray a bit to the left, the black one a tiney tiney bit to the right, and THEN go to contrast and brightness, or the other way around offcourse.
Like this:
*And then my taste kicks in and I add a "new layer via copy". Then I go to image-->adjustments-->hue/saturation. Then I drag saturation to almost black and white. Then I take the erase tool and erase the desaturated layer from the car so the car still appears in color. Or just erase some of the background. It's your choice, if alot of black and white is in the picture, the picture usually needs much more contrast afterwards. Then go to Layer-->Flatten to make one layer of all the layers again
Like this:
-THEN the texture adjusting. Cleanup, blur and sharpening, meaning:
*On the left, in the tool bar, there's one option on wich you can hold down your mouse button, and select a waterdrop, it's the blur tool (for those who're totally new

), now go up and change the brush size to 4 pixels, set opacity to 40% or something. Look for rough egdes, once spotted, go to the spot and zoom in twice, now go over the little black borderlines to smoothen them out. Rough edges will disappear this way. This is a clean up method I use in every picture I photoshop. Zoom twice out again to get to normal view again, and keep doing this. Dont overblur things, there's a limit where, once you exceed it, you stop blurring ugly parts and start blurring out important details, wich is wrong.
Headlights for example are very sensitive for overblurring.
Like this:
*Then for some background blur go to
440's Charger's tutorial wich also helped me alot at learning sophisticating blurring today:tup:
*After the second texture step, I have often overblurred it and dont like the look of it, I go to filter-->sharpen and just select the first normal "sharpen" option. If you dont like that because it oversharpened...well it's your call, it kinda depends on the circumstances too.
Hope it helped:tup:

PS The pictures havent been taken in the order in wich I typed everything, thats why the blur example ^above^ isn't with less saturation yet.
With this base picture, I eventually made this:
Succes!!