Hussein Al Attar Photoshop rendering

HUSSEIN AL-ATTAR
PHOTOSHOP RENDERING

Hussein Al-Attar is a 22 year old amateur car designer who has taken part in international design contests such as the MotorTrend Design Contest, in which he reached the 3rd place in his category. His short clients list includes some respectable names of leading companies like Sixt Rent A Car, Bridger Conway and Heron Automobiltechnik.

Hussein has not started his design studies yet, though he is planning to apply to Pforzheim University in 2007 to start a proper design education and give his self taught skills a professional touch. He is an Iraqi citizen and is currently living in Germany. For more of his work check out his portfolios at www.husseindesign.deviantart.com and www.cardesignnews.com/portfolios/husseindesign

In this tutorial Hussein Al-Attar will guide you step by step the techniques he has developed for creating digital renderings in Adobe Photoshop. The version he has used in this tutorial is CS2 although any recent version of Photoshop will suffice. You do not need a graphics tablet to achieve these results here as Hussein only works with a mouse. The most important technique he will show is how and why to select areas that must have sharp edges. To do this he will show how to use either the Pen tool or the Polygonal Lasso tool. Hussein says "If you choose to use the Lasso tool you may have some problems when it comes to selecting curved areas. A good idea would be to reduce the distance between clicks when selecting your curve. Although not a perfect solution, it allows you to work reasonably accurately and fast."

You can now select the outline of the car. If you have used the Polygonal Lasso to make your selection you can simply right click on the selection and choose LAYER VIA COPY. If you made the selection with the Pen tool you will have to (after converting the path into a selection) choose the Polygonal Lasso and then right-click on the selection and choose a LAYER VIA COPY. Now you have a new layer with the cars silhouette above the layer that you filled in step 2. Change the colour of the lower layer by using IMAGE > ADJUSTMENT > HUE/SATURATION in order to create a contrast between the car and the background.

So lets get it started. As you can see, the sketch we are going to start with can be pretty rough. It will at this stage only be a guideline, and will be switched off later.

Double click on the sketch layer (background layer) and turn it into a normal layer. Doing this will allow you to change the layers blending mode to MULTIPLY. You will then be able to place new layers underneath and colour the sketch without losing the pencil lines.

Now we can start to work on the reflections. Select the areas you want to highlight and use the Dodge tool to brighten these areas. If you look at the top of the page right under the menu bar you will see a pull down menu (when you have dodge tool selected). This has a default setting of MIDTONES. There are also two other settings, HIGHLIGHTS and SHADOWS. Try all three and work with the one that brings the kind of result you are looking for. IMPORTANT. In this case we want the highlights to have both sharp and soft blurred borders. To achieve this you will have to take a large blurred brush and use it with only half inside your selected area. With this technique you wont have to be worried about having less control if you are using a mouse, the selection will do the job for you.

Now you can select the area of the body that you want to have in a different colour than the rest of the car. In this case it is the windows, windshield and the silver side bar. For these parts you can change the colours using the same techniques described in step 3. You can also see that I have also cut out the areas that are not part of the body, for example the front air intakes. Do that by making a selection around them and hitting delete (on the correct layer). We could have done this earlier but I forgot!