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Editing: Finishing the Interior Dash

Okay. So in the field yesterday we shot a few different interior shots. And what I did was I did like a panoramic move on a tripod. And so I took three different shots, but in each one of those shots, I took three different exposures. Again, bracketing, just so you're getting a consistency throughout the entire car with the interior. Interiors are pretty important because you don't want leather or stitching or any type of texture to get lost. You want everything to be pretty prominent, just so the consumer can see what's inside of the car, obviously. So what I am going to do is show you how to do a panoramic stitching and then basically bracketing the photos beforehand and then we'll do the panoramic and then we'll go straight into the editing. And a lot of times too, with editing interiors you're not going to want to go too wild. You want to keep it pretty minimum and subtle and as realistic as possible. So let's get into it. All right. So these are my first images right here, as you ...

can see there's a few different exposures. So we're going to mess around with those. I'm going to click and use those four photos we're going to merge them and we're just going to bracket those and yeah, get the brackets done first. And then we can go ahead and do the panoramic merge, so. All right merge those together. Again, you're going to have to wait for those. And while I'm waiting for that let's go ahead and go to the middle section of those the panoramic images that I did. So let's go and find those three different exposures three or four, usually I'll do three. So let's find the best ones 'cause you're going to want an overexposed one underexposed one and just like a, you know, right in between ones, so. Let's find those that the ones we want to use and let's bracket those. All right, let's merge these while we're waiting for that left side. All right those two photos are ready to go. We got the left and we got the middle side. Let's work on the right side. I think 'cause of these files are so big on Lightroom that I'm not able to do three different images on some of these 'cause they're pretty wide and there's a lot of information. I think it's just slowing down Lightroom. So let's just stick with two. I'll find the best two that fits. So an overexposed and an underexposed. And I think the best way to do it as well is when it's underexposed and you can see the dynamic range in the background, you're not losing anything. You can see kind of all the texture around here. I think that's going to give your best bet with the photo you want. So just be aware of that. Let's use that one as an underexposed and then what I like to do as well, so I don't miss that photo, you can just come up to your keyboard, press any number one through five it'll start for you. And then that way you're not going to lose that photo. You can remember and go back to it. So let's find an overexposed one that fits for this and that looks good. I should've probably overexposed it a little bit, but that one should work. So let's merge these two together. In an ideal world we would've had a nice scrim over the car which would've led to little to no reflections in panels like that carbon fiber that I was just hovering over. But you know, you got to work with what you got and yeah, do what you got to do so. (whistling) Crazy. All right. So once this is done uploading once it's done finishing the brackets and merging then we'll go ahead and with those three different angles that you bracketed and merged, we'll take those three stitch them together as a panoramic and we'll get a nice wide image of the interior, so. So as you can see down here I'm going to go into each one and just star it with a five. That way you're not losing track of which ones you're going to grab for the stitching. And it's just easier that way. So real quick, I'm going to point out with this middle photo. So the middle photo and the left side photo I have a bit of busyness in this world right here with the rear view mirror. That's okay because we can go into Photoshop later, clean it up and it's going to be no problem. All right, let's grab those three images and we're going to stitch them together and see what we can work with. And what I'm doing is I'm just pressing command and clicking those three images. You can right click on one of those and let's go to photo merge and we'll do Panorama. All right. So as you can see, obviously you're not going to want to use this photo. It is however, I'm going auto crop just to save us that. So right there, you're not getting any warped, anything. In an ideal world, again, I could have, well, I should have measured this out a little bit but that's okay. 'Cause what we can do is just crop it here in a second. All right, so here you have it. These are the three images that we stacked and laid this panoramic out. You can see that this side obviously has more room so I'm going to crop this and keep it locked right here too. So you're not getting, you're not messing with that crop at all and all the edges are going to stay the same. And let's just make it perfect. And we can just focus on the dash here and that's okay because at the end of the day you're going to have something nice for a catalog and it's just a good wide view of the dash and display up here, so. I am not happy with this image right now. Hold on. All right, so what we're going to do now is I'm going to go in and usually like I said, interiors are kind of hard to put a treatment over because you don't want to get all the details lost or you don't want any of this down here to get lost. And in an ideal world, we would've had clean formats and just car prep on hand, but we didn't so we're going to work with what we have and try to make something cool with this interior. And let's just try to make it as clean as possible. So I'm just going to hover over some of these presets and let's just try to find the best one that fits this. All right, so. I chose a preset that worked for me. It was a bit hard, but you know, you can choose that certain treatment. And then the fun part begins where you tweak it a bunch and it's all trial and error but that is okay because that's where the magic starts and can kind of just have fun with it. So let's go ahead and figure out what we want to do with this and try to just be like pretty fluid throughout the entire thing. So as you can see, there are some shadows that are getting lost in here. But I think the main part is I said these formats are pretty dirty. I'm not going to want to show that just because you don't want anything busy and you don't want your eye to catch. Be like, oh, there's a dirty car. What I did, however, show while I was shooting was car play. And as you can see down here there's a cord right here that's plugged into the phone. That's okay. Sometimes client will ask you to take that out and shoot a clean console and then usually we'll have a car off and then you'll just comp in a digital screen here but I just kept it on. And so that's what we're going to work with. So let's just go ahead and figure out what we're going to do with this. I obviously already want the interior a little brighter. So I'm going to click this radial tool. I'm gonna go in here, go out there. And as you can see the line the radius is over the interior of the car and that's okay. 'Cause there's going to be a feather and you're not going to the feather tool or the feather bar is what I'm getting at. So right here, I would just keep it at 50 for now. Let's reset that. And you can start messing with, I'm going to mess with shadows. Obviously I'll go to invert. And that way you're messing around with everything in that radio tool. So as you can see, it's bringing up a lot of the shadows that are in here, which is what I wanted. I'm messing with clarity, but you know sometimes you'll do clarity and it'll be too noisy. And like I said, you're not going to want that. So if it's looking good and it's not too noisy, yeah you can mess with it. But see how, when I'm doing the clarity, it's bringing out highlights and it's just looking a little too contrasted and sharp. That's not ideal. So let's bring that down to 10. You can also just come to here and type in 10, if you want. Let's keep it there. Let's zoom out of there and kind of mess with some of the other gaps that we're missing. It's already looking pretty nice. What I think I'll do is I'll come down in here in the floor mats and brush kind of stop down on the shadows just so we're not seeing any of that dirtiness of the floor mat So let's mess around with it a little bit more once it looks good. Let's bring in that brush. All right. Go ahead and grab the brush. And I am going to bring down the shadows down here just so we can hide those mats a little bit. As you can see, it's already looking a lot better. And with this driver's side, I think it'll be nice to have the accents with the brake and the gas pedal. So just slightly go over that mat. Don't go over those pedals at all. And if you do, it's okay, you got the eraser tool but just knowing that those pedals are down there and you can see them a little bit just gives you a little bit more of a perspective what is underneath there. Once you're happy with that, let's work on. I'm going to bring up this background just a little bit. So as you can see, the background has the yellow orange-ish hues. So I'm going to go over here with the orange bar mess around with it and actually you might bring up the oranges in the display where the CarPlay is around here. And if you're getting that, leave it alone. What you can do is come up to the brush. Reset the effects. And I'm going to just bring up saturation just a tiny bit. And we're going to go over the background a little bit and I might bump up the clarity in the background just a little bit just so there's a little bit of texture and it just gives it a little bit more of a just a different feel. And if I don't like it, I can reset that as well. So let's figure out what we like, what we don't like. I'm liking that already. Let's see if we bump up the saturation just a little more. That's looking nice. Cool. Sweet. I'm digging it already. Let's see it before and after. See, it's pretty subtle, obviously raw versus now. I'm going to probably bring some of the saturation up and maybe some of the highlights out a little more, maybe just a tiny bit contrasted, but as you can see, pretty subtle, but the background's sticking out a little more, which is nice. You don't want a blown out background. So yeah, let's work with the interior just a tiny bit more. Mess with these whites a little bit. The whites might be a little too much. Might be a little too hot but that's looking all right. Cool. Real quick. I always just like to see what my white balance is doing up here. So I'll just come across to go left to right a few times just to see if anything else looks good. Obviously that warm is too warm. Just kind of mess around with it and see what you like. I'm going to stick there. And I think that should be good for the interior. Again, I'm going to go through Photoshop later and clean up this whole left side of the rear view mirror just because we've got someone in there and that's okay. But yeah, that is interior and let's move on to other things.