Turn a BMW Z3 into a Cuban Oldtimer in 7 Steps

What would you think about tuning your bmw by replacing half of it with pieces of an old Cuban car? You would get something like this:

Talk about a pimped car! Maybe a little difficult to make this in real life (a challenge for the people of West Coast Customs?), but in Photoshop, everybody can do this. How? Read on:

1. Find your source-pictures. I found this picture of a Cuban car and this one from a BMW. There's only one place to find your materials: Google image search. Open the files in Photoshop and throw them in a single file (from the size of the BMW-pic). Call the layers "cubancar" and "bmw".

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2. First thing to do, is to mirror the red car. Select the layer and apply edit>transform>flip horizontal. Now, adjust the size of the car with the free transform tool: press ctrl+T or edit>transform>free transform (if you set the layer opacity to about 60%, you can see trough it, so it's easier to crop to the right size).

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Now we have our two cars in place.

3. Now draw a path around the right part of the Cuban car, without the window, with the path tool. If you haven't worked with the path tool before, read this first. (If you want to save a path for later use, give it path a name)

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Turn the path into a selection by clicking on the third icon at the bottom of the path palette.

Then, apply a layer mask on the cubancar-layer with this selection (everything outside the selection becomes black in the layer mask and in this way invisible).

Now you may delete the shape layer.

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4. Click on the layer mask to edit it, and paint with a soft brush (for example size 100, opacity 50%) over the transition, to make it fade nicely.

5. It's time to adjust the colors. Therefore, make a lasso selection ("L") around the red part of the Cuban car (so our adjustments won't effect the color of the license plate and the chrome).

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Copy and paste this part to a new layer (ctrl+C , ctrl+V). Now, press ctrl+U or go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation to change the colors. Use this values: hue: -136, saturation: -86, lightness: +8 (experiment with this settings).

Set the blending mode of this layer to "color".

6. There are still some parts of the BMW visible from behind the Cuban car. To solve this problem, select the bmw-layer (first, duplicate the layer - because we need it in the next step- and work on the copy) and take the clone stamp tool ("S") to stamp these parts away. Alt-click to select a color/texture (for example the grass or the stones) and then brush away, over the car.

7. Last thing to do, is making a BMW-worthy wheel out of the old Cuban front wheel. Copy the front wheel of the bmw from the original bmw-layer and paste it. Use the eraser ("E") with a soft brush to make it blend nicely with the cuban wheel.

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Finished!