Distracting Background

YourName

Hope some people can help me out here:

I am getting into photography at the moment but have only been doing it for a short time in comparison to many people on here I am sure.

I was asked to do a favour for a good friend of mine who has his own business, basically he had sponsored a racing driver and his company logo would be on the side of the car. I went out and took a load of pics of the car, driver, owner, advertisement etc. etc., and I came up with some pretty good shots in the end.

However there is just one thing ruining it all, I was in a position where I had to do the shoot on a race day, so I was in the place where everyone parks up their cars and fixes them up before the race (pit???) so the background of the pics is made up of other people walking around and other cars and trucks etc, which is too distracting. (Lesson learned for the future)

So basically I want to fix up the pics, I am new with photo-shop but I ain't getting on too bad with it to date as I am just trying out new things but since these are the first few pics that will be properly used I wanted to ask a bit of advice on how I could best sort out the background???

I have a background I could use of the race track that I could put in there but how???

Now I amount overly worried about this, as there is a possibility that I will be able to do it again, and I will do my best so I ain't in this situation again, but I want to sort these out too.

I don't really want to be posting the pics up here as I don't have his permission and I don't exactly want to be going to ask him either, so just a bit of advice would do if anyone knows the best way how.

Thanks,
mcgowaner

AnCatDubh

there are probably many ways of achieving it but one suggestion is to use a quick mask - try a google "quick mask tutorial" on it and just remove / erase the background see something like this - one baby extracted from the bland background and landed onto a blue sky (cheesy or what). I take it that this is what you are hoping to do with the car.

If doing a complete background exchange then be very careful. You will have to be cautious in erasing around the car and the individual - in my opinion, to do it properly does require a fair amount of skill. Many times i've seen images which have been done like this and it just looks wrong - background a different exposure to the foreground, the cut out image just looks like it has actually been cut out on cardboard and stuck on the image, etc.... It needs to be very well done to produce acceptable results.

Borderfox

I use a program called fluid mask 3 and its superb at extracting objects out of photos, I use it a lot for products where they want to put the product onto any colour background. Pm me and I can give one of the shots a go and send it back to you?

challengemaster

I'd be careful if you're going to drop in a new background to a picture of a car, it could look very fake if done wrong. If it's just a case of some simple objects around the place then maybe you could get away with a bit of cloning (and patience)

YourName

Yeh I did a bit of Quick Mask and it was very painstaking and anoying, but I got low down when I took the picture and none of my backgrounds that I was going to use were taken low down so it is just too obvious. I'm not sure if I could get an image to fit the background as its taken at a wierd angle like.

I will keep on looking and see what happens.

Theres nothing else I can really do though . . . .