Four Steps To Zoom-Zoom; Digital Drag Racing

Text and Photos by Joe Farace, June, 2005

Joe Farace is a Colorado-based writer and photographer who photographs a wide variety of subjects. You can see more of Joe’s work online at: www.joefarace.com or joefaraceshootscars.com Time to Complete 20-30 minutes Skill Level Intermediate Tools Required • Adobe Photoshop CS • Picto iCorrect EditLab Pro • Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener Downloads Available For free trial downloads of the popular plug-ins mentioned in this article, please visit our website at: photographic.com/download_june1. I love import drag racing and have been known to take my GTI 337 down the strip just for the fun of it. Living in Colorado we don’t have much of a winter racing scene, except for the ice racers, of course, but that doesn’t mean that even cars parked indoors at a car show can’t look like they’re racing. Let me show you how to do it in just four steps: Step 1: Capture An Image This photograph of Mazda RX-7 drag racer was made at the International Auto Salon in Los Angeles using a Canon EOS D60 digital SLR with 16mm Sigma lens attached. Exposure was 1/60 at f/16 with an ISO setting of 800. Color balance was set on Auto and it did an acceptable job with the mixed lighting sources in the L.A. Convention Center. Even while making it, I recognized that several things needed to be done with this image to make it better but the most important was eliminating the cluttered background. 1. Step 2: Image Enhancement I think it’s a good idea to make an image look as good as possible before starting any manipulations and in this case it meant improving the overall color. I opened the image file in Adobe Photoshop CS (www.adobe.com) and applied one of the best power tools available for fine-tuning color. PictoColor’s (www.picto.com) iCorrect EditLab correction and color management software is available as either a Photoshop compatible plug-in or a stand-alone application and using it is as simple as 1-2-3-4, which is how the tabs in its interface are set up. Just waltz through the tabs gradually improving how the image in the preview window looks as you go. Since I shot the RX-7 at a relatively slow shutter speed, I decided to sharpen the image just a bit, too. One of the best solutions—maybe the best—for image sharpening that I’ve found is PhotoKit Sharpener (www.pixelgenius.com), a set of automatic Photoshop compatible plug-ins that sharpen based on the way that the image was captured and work great whether the original was film or digital. The interface is simple: You select the kind of sharpening effect you want and how the image was captured from two pop-up menus, and PhotoKit Sharpener does the rest. 2. Step 3: Create A Duplicate Layer Now that I had the image of the RX-7 looking good, the next step was creating a duplicate layer (Layer>Duplicate Layer) that I labeled “Zoom.” All subsequent effects will be applied to the duplicate layer, leaving the original image (below) untouched. 3.