Tire Shine

[Robbie Comeau]

I have a picture, in which I must make the tires shine. Is there an effect in Photoshop CS 1, that can do this making it look realistic?

Thanks,

Robbie

 

[Matt Grunau]

Firstly, don't always look for filters/effects to do what you want. Filters are great, but knowing why they do what they do, and how, when, and where to use them is very important.

That said, in order to make the tires look shiny, you have to think about what makes them that way. Get some Armor All or something equivalent, clean a tire, slap on the Armor All, step back and take a look. Give yourself a reference.

The tires now are far to light. Use an Adjustment Layer with Levels or Curves to darken them, taking advantage of the Adjustment Layer's Layer mask to define just the tires. Or, make a new layer above, fill it with a dark gray, and again, use a Layer Mask to define the area of the tires. Then set that new layer's Blending Mode to Darken, Multiply, or any other of the "darkening" Blending modes. Adjust Opacity to taste.

For shine, make a new layer and put a white dot or shape where you want the shine to be. Use the brush tool with little to no hardness or the Free Lasso tool and paint bucket (paying attention to the light source).

Then apply a Gaussian blur to what looks right. You may even use two or three blur layers stacked (maybe even differently filled or painted shapes), the one with the highest blur set to the lowest Opacity and all blended together.

 

[cecil995]

I agree. Filters are usually just shortcuts.

That being said, take a look at this: