are those the factory MR wheels?! cool chop

^^ Yeah look like the stock BBS wheels for the MR.

It's amazing how a nice drop can make a car look so much better.

Wow that chop looks fantastic.

The stance makes the car look sick.

^ Agreed

I think it looks good

That's how it should've came from the factory!

thats impressive, photoshop FTW

The CF looks ok, but the rest of the chop is a quickie job.

The car isn't lowered, its wheels (and the platform) are raised, that's why is looks so seamless in the pic. The platform is the giveaway.

Thanks to anyone that likes it, but I did it in photoshop and it's just a regular production car. The original picture actually came off of a thread in this forum, and I lowered the car, increased the wheel size by about 1", added some shadows, and added the CF texture from some other picture that I had. The car was black if I recall correctly.

Lowering the car, increasing the wheel size, and adding some shadows is actually very easy and takes probably 2-3 mins. Adding the CF texture was a bit more time consuming but still probably took no more than 20 mins or so. I chop cars for fun all the time and can post some others if anyone is interested in seeing.

I'm not totally sure I understand the distinction you're making between lowering body of the car and raising the wheels and how that impacts how unrealistic it looks; can you elaborate and explain?

Here's the other evo picture that I did the CF effect to, probably the same day

...

Just an observation.

The difference is, it is far more easy to cut out the platform and wheels in Photoshop and raise the lower half of the image than it is to cut out the car and background then drop it. Primarily, with cars, this is because when cutting a car off of a background, you have to content with cutting out the windows (and if they're tinted, applying opacity changes to them). When using that approach (while keeping the original background), you then have to go back and custom paint the 1" of background that now appears blank because you've moved the body down 1"... plus, if the background has identifiable lines (such as the colored 'arc' on the wall), those will have to be adjusted/repainted because the when lowering the car, the tangent lines on the wall won't line up. It's a lot of work to make look good.

A better approach is what I'm assuming he did, simply cut across the bottom of the image, along the bottom of the car, over the wheel wells and raise the bottom half of the image. Then, as he mentioned, cut out the wheels themselves and scale them up to 19" sized rims. When all is done there, you will be left with a 1" blank border at the bottom of the page... which is easily lost when you crop the image down a bit.

As I mentioned before, the giveaway is the platform... if you look in front (specifically) and behind the car, the arc of the circular platform has some quick scribble overpaint on it to lessen the fact the he's raised the base.

(The same approach could be done the exact opposite, using the same cut line, the you could drag the top layer down, crop the top down by 1".)


Make sense?

At any rate, I think the car looks great. I don't know if I'd CF the door posts though.



PS I'm a visual effects guy for TV, edited images totally stand out for me.