A complex car park problem

[blueskylondon]

Hello team,
I would like to get inspiration from the brightest minds here.
Please take a look at the picture, part of a much broader landscape.

I am looking to create a much neater, organised, parking view, by harmonising the cars colour palette.
A lot of the white car actually aren’t white they are covered with a protective sheet.
I believe ultimately I want to keep deep blue, white and deep brown for the car colours.

A mentionner this is part of a broader landscape, of about 140 by 200 cms in 300 dpis, so I need ultimate realism, with the shadows etc, not a quick paint over job.
How would go about this problem, folks?
Very curious to read your views!

best
Dan

 

[chrisdesign]

Hallo Dan,

I did some thinking and came to the conclusion that what you want to create will be a huge project that will require an incredible amount of graphic art skills.
1. You have to sketch a possible harbor area with pencil and paper to have a rough overview.
2. You now need good artistic skills, like architects do, to model a three-dimensional surface from this sketch using a professional 3D program.
3. Now the modeling detail work begins to create everything in the 3D program such as roads, trees, buildings, cars and parking lots, the entire port facility with ships and cranes with access to this huge parking lot.
4. In order to achieve photographic liveliness, all parts must be equipped with appropriate material and suitable lighting must be found. Finally, the whole file can be rendered.

I think that this project requires a whole team to complete these different steps.

A completely new possibility could be to have the whole work generated with the help of AI programs.

However, at the moment there is probably no one in this forum with these skills who would be willing to try and find a solution.

 

[blueskylondon]

Mmm isnt an overkill?

Or actually maybe I was not clear. I am simply looking to change the colours of the cars, no need for any 3d model...

 

[chrisdesign]

Your posted picture has very little detail in the cars. That's why I decided to replace the cars. I had to give up an attempt with "generated fill" with Photoshop after many tries. I achieved this result with "old school" techniques. I hope this is more like your original idea.

 

[IamSam]

I am looking to create a much neater, organised, parking view, by harmonising the cars colour palette.

Personally with this photo, you are asking for way more work than I think you're prepared to do. Unless someone was paying me a huge amount of money, I would walk away from this project.

I need ultimate realism, with the shadows etc, not a quick paint over job.

OK, on the most realistic side I can tell you that when dealing with an individual white car, you have to re-color the car using a solid color adjustment layer set to multiply with a layer mask. Multiply will best preserve the shadowing. Now you just can't paint over the windows either, you have to mask out the body of "each" individual car! For example, I picked two vans from the image and changed their colors.

Cars that have color are more difficult to change their colors.





So now if I wanted colorize a specific section of cars, I would need to isolate them by making a selection of them, placing the selection to it's own layer (not actually necessary but helps with organization), apply a general color with a color fill adjustment layer set to multiply, and then start the tedious task of altering the mask to remove color from the windows of the cars.

Selection.


Color added using color fill adjustment layer with a mask, blending mode set to Multiply.


Windows and other objects masked out with the brush tool.




You could also Isolate a section, use color range to select a specific color. This will help in brushing out the color on windows................but for this image,, it does not work well, too pixelated due to low res!