[LeDave]

How do I PP my car photographs to make it so sharp, colorful, and vividly amazing as the first set of pictures posted by Scomatic

Here is the link to the Photographs, https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/129-weekly-photo-challenges/308424-projec...ject-cars.html

And here is mine below,

[Sliver-Surfer]

If you have lightroom fiddle with clarify, sharpen and vibrance as well as shadow and highlight settings

[LeDave]

The examples at the top of the contest thread are all heavily photoshopped and in many cases not very well!

Pic 1 looks overcooked and looks like a cut and paste job on the car since the shadows and perspective look very unnatural. Don't aim for that.

The reflection in #2 is done in photoshop and looks unnatural as well. The swirling in the water is all wrong, and you can see the reflection of the tarmac road surface in the side of the car!

#3 appears to be another cut and paste with bad shadows and perspective.

The backgrounds in 4, 5, 6 (which are nicely done) were desaturated to add color pop to the car (maybe not so useful for a white car like yours). All appear to have had some tone mapping done.

The speedometer pic is just a B+W pic with little processing.

Advice:
For sharpness of the car edges, do a high pass layer with a radus of 1-3 pixels, set the blend to overlay, and mask out the layer in the background areas.

All of the example pics are static except for the last one. For your in-motion shots, mask out the car itself and apply heavier motion blur to the backgrounds as done in 9.

A more diffuse and dark vignette centered on the car in your third one might give it more pop.

To boost the color, switch to lab mode and adjust contrast on the A and B channels separately.

Use dodge and burn tools to increase contrast between areas you want to accentuate and their surroundings.

Thanks!