Having discovered last week how much fun I can have playing with old car photos (from last summer’s Cruisin’ festival in Morro Bay), today I’ve been going way overboard in Photoshop. Like, “skipping lunch” kind of overboard. Which, if you know how I feel about lunch, you know is pretty far overboard.
It actually started last night when I decided to have a little scurrilous adventure with Copilot, Microsoft’s excessively polite but artisitically savvy AI. Looking back through my old Facebook photos of Cruisin’, I found this picture, of the beautiful and monstrous engine from an old school street rod:
(The car itself is shown in the photo at top. More on that in a bit.)
So anyway, that’s a pretty awesome powerplant, no doubt, and vastly satisfying to look at for any true gearhead. On the other hand, from the standpoint of art, it’s a bit limited.
So I decided to get a little goofy with it. I asked Copilot to take my photo and render it as if it were a still photo out of a Pixar Cars movie:
What?! Are you kidding me? That’s amazing! At that point, Copilot started tempting me with ideas about giving the character a backstory and even building out a little movie. Well, all that seemed a bit dicey considering that Cars is, y’know, somebody else’s intellectual property. I did settle, though, for giving this ersatz character a name — Cruise Pendragon (in honor of the drag racing legend Cruz Pedregon) — and Copilot threw together a poster for him:
Anyway, I said I’d come back to the photo at top, showing the street rod in all its glory at Cruisin’. If you look closely, you’ll likely notice that the color has been messed with quite a bit. Today, resolving to stop aping Hollywood and get back to wasting time in Photoshop, I experimented with applying multiple layers and filter effects. The roadster was one product of that effort — though at the end of the day, I may actually prefer this version, which I produced with Silver Efex, the product I discussed a couple weeks ago:
Ronald Crittenden 