Now, the first thing you need is the background image, that will be our road.
Open the Photoshop and create a new document with the settings at your choice. Mine will be the following ones:
Import the image to the document and scale it as you wish.
After these steps, we need to give a darker look to the texture, and for that, create an adjustment layer. That adjustment layer will be the Hue/Saturation. Set the following values:
Next, duplicate the background layer and place it above the adjustment layer.
And we're done with the background. Let's now proceed to the yellow stripes. Draw the two shapes, one larger than the other, with the color #ffd800 and select both. Set the blend mode of it to overlay and still with the two layers selected the free transform(or CMD+T and then CMD+click) tool to distort both shapes at the same time!
Before adding some text to the main stripe, we need to add an important detail. Outer Glow effect in the blending options. This will help us making the shapes more realistic and more rough, instead of so regular.
To add some text, select the text tool, and set the color to #999999. The font that I used on my document was Impact and Italic. Write whatever you want and place it somewhere the larger yellow stripe. Display the blend mode to Multiply.
The text looks like crap isn't it? To get this better, we need to delete the text area in the larger stripe layer. To do that, rasterize the larger stripe layer by clicking on the right mouse button and selecting rasterize layer. Press CMD and click the thumbnail of text layer, to select the text. Then, with the selection of the text, select again the stripe layer and press Delete. Now we should have a better look.
To make the tire print we will use a brush, but you can use anything else such as a texture, just be creative! You can download the brush here. If you don't know how to import a brush to photoshop, learn how to do it here. Import it to photoshop, leave all settings as they appear and change only the brush size and its spacing.
Now, select the Pen tool, and draw a path like in the image bellow, and then opening the Paths tab, select the path and stroke the path with brush.
To complete the tire detail, set the layer blend mode to soft light, down the opacityaround to 75% and apply a gaussian blur filter with about 2px.
The funny thing in this tutorial is that we can come up with nice results without following every detail in tutorials. Some time ago I've checked this tutorial. The result was very nice, applying some great techniques. What we learn here today is that if we don't follow the tutorial in every single line, we're being creatives and have some excellent results too. So, moving foward, grab the text tool, and type "4x4" or anything you want (remember, be creative!). Try different settings on the character panel, by reducing the letterspacing or so. In this case, we have different font-sizes on the same layer text. The letter "x" is smaller than the other ones, and the letter spacing has been decreased to join the letters. The font is TS BLOCK and you can download it here. The color of the text doesn't matter since we gonna use gradient overlay on the blending options.
Open the blending options panel for this layer and apply this settings.
The gradient used on stroke is the same used on gradient overlay.
Here's the result of the layer style we applied.
Now our composition is done. Anyway, the image is not so that dramatic, so let's add some more things to improve it. First, create a new layer on top of all layers. And then make a selection of the "4x4" layer by pressing CMD and clicking the layer's thumbnail. Grab the brush tool, set it to 50px and 0% of hardness. The color is white. Paint the whiter area of the text like shown bellow.
Press CMD+D to deselect the area and apply a gaussian blur filter around 7px. The result should look like this.
Again, create a new layer, and fill it with black. Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare, and set up the value to 165% after choosing the first option on Lens Type menu. Next, set the blend mode of the layer to Overlay.
Final Result
This is my final result. We could even add a metal texture to the "4x4" layer to look a little bit more realistic and a countless options as well. Now it is all up to you! Do not forget to show us yours!
