Design a Professional Car Advert

Step 1:

Open up a new document, 600X600px. Create a new layer called 'background' and select filter>render>clouds.

Step 2:

Go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and lower the brightness to -100 and the contrast to -75. Then go to the layer's blending options and apply a gradient overlay effect ranging from 080F1A to 162A4B. Set the blend mode of the gradient to 'overlay' and make it's opacity 90%. The outcome should look like the image below:

Step 3:

Paste a photo of a cool looking car into the center of your image. Cut it out from it's background using the magic wand tool or lasso tool (whichever you prefer) and be sure not to leave any harsh edges. I had to go in with the lasso tool and cut away very thin remains of my white background so that it blended better with my dark image background.

Step 4:

Now I want to change the color/appearance of my car, so I go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and then increase the hue by 73, the saturation by 65 and reduce the lightness by -18 to achieve the effect below:

Step 5:

This is looking better, but obviously the window is wrong. I want a dark window, and so using the lasso tool select around my window shape. Then I go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and decrease the brightness to -100 and the contrast to -75.

Step 6:

Now to give the car a little more contrast and shadow I select the wheels and headlights and reduce the brightness to -35 and up the contrast to +15. To select the wheels I use my elliptical marquee tool and drag my cursor out from the center of each wheel whilst holding shift+alt (this creates a perfect circle).

Step 7:

Now paste in a photo of a man's torso (without clothes).

Step 8:

Now cut out the arms from the man using the lasso tool and resize/rotate them to fit nicely around the car. It should ideally look like the arms are hugging the car. Be sure to delete the parts of the arms overlapping near the front of the car, but leave the hands/wrists in tact near the back so that they are overlapping the vehicle.

Step 9:

Now desaturate your arm layers and reduce the brightness/contrast of the bottom arm so that it's lighting matches the top arm better (before it was far too light as the man was being lit from one side in the original photo).

Step 10:

Now go to image>adjustments>color balance for your arm layers and for shadows/midtones/highlights make it around 0 on the Cyan/Red level, around +25 on the Magenta/Green level and around +40 on the Yellow/Blue level. You'll need to play around with these figures a little but this is a rough guide. Make sure 'Preserve Luminosity' is checked.

Step 11:

Now we want these arms to be a bit more subtle, and not obviously arms at first glance. I go to brightness/contrast adjustments and reduce the brightness to -75 for each layer, and then the contrast to -25.

Step 12:

Now I select the layer containing my top arm and use a large, soft eraser brush to brush away most of the hand, letting it slowly fade into the car instead of looking too obvious and imposing.

Step 13:

Just to make my car photo a little sharper I select it's layer and reduce the brightness by 12 and up the contrast by 5.

Step 14:

Now I duplicate my car photo layer and move the duplicate layer above the original and my arm photo layers. I go to filter>blur>motion blur and use a horizontal blur applied at 355px in strength.

Step 15:

I go back to my original car layer and using the magic wand tool select the area around my car image. Then I invert my selection to be selecting my car. Then I go to my motion blurred car layer and hit delete, deleting the part of the blur that covers my car, and leaving the blur either side.

Step 16:

To make the edges of my arms stick out a little more I apply a 1px light blue drop shadow (10% opacity) to my bottom area to emphasize this bottom edge. Then to achieve the same effect with the top edge of the top arm I apply a 1px light blue inner shadow (10% opacity).

Step 17:

Now I duplicate my original car layer and go to edit>transform>flip vertical. I move the flipped car image down near the bottom of my image and using edit>distort drag out the bottom corners of my image to create a kind of perspective.

Step 18:

I then reduce this layer's opacity to 4% and using a layer mask (reveal all) drag a black to white gradient downwards to fade away the bottom part of the image.

And we're done!

To finish off I apply some text to the top of my image and in the layer's blending options apply a light blue outer glow (opacity: 20, spread: 10, size: 21).