How To Lower Your Car
 

Here's a quick tutorial to show you how to lower your car to give it a nice stance.

First decide on an image, a 3/4 angle works best, but a side shot works also. Front shots wont show you much of anything, so try to avoid them;)

Start by selecting around the underside of the car's front bumper, wheel wells, side panels/skirts, and rear bumper. You want to start the selection off to the side of the image, and end off the other edge of the image.

When you make your selection, you want to then go around the rest of the image that is above what you just selected. (So that everything below the car's body [wheels included] is not selected).

http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/8424/27717031as1.jpg

Notice how I made sure the selection area doesnt cut off anything in the background, that it makes a nice flush selection. If you chop right through something in the background, it will look funny when you lower the car, because you are lowering the background with the car.

That being said, copy the selected area to a new layer.

http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/8633/86547118hy9.jpg

Now, Zoom in on a part of the car at the edge of the area you selected. i like to zoom in on the wheel wells, because this is the most noticable area where your drop occurs.

now with the new layer, hold and drag the layer straight down until the car's height is at its desired location.

Being zoomed in, allows you to lower the car in smaller incriments so you dont always make your car look like its riding on Air Ride suspension.

When I lowered the car in my picture, the front of the side panel was behind the front wheel, and now it is in front of the wheel. We want to fix that, so go ahead and select the area that is sticking out in front of the wheel and delete it.

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/1703/34349435qi5.jpg

Since you lowered the car with the new layer, you exposed some area of the layer below at the top of the image. We dont want to see this, so we will go and use the Crop Tool to crop out that area of the picture. Select everywhere but the area that you want removed with the crop tool, and then hit the Check Mark button to accept the Crop, and the image will remove the unwanted area.

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/8948/54599234ld0.jpg

http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/2808/37574481yz0.jpg

Alright, there you go, now your car has a nice lowered stance to it, without it looking too low.

RE: How To Lower Your Car
 

Thanks for the tutorial. :D
I've always wondered how ya'll lowered the car without making the background all screwed up.