Playing around with chrome

To be honest, this post isn't really "model-related". It probably doesn't qualify as "handicrafts" either. But it may just be of passing interest to one or two readers. So that's fair enough.

The 1967 Pontiac was a very handsome piece of styling, and doesn’t really deserve to be messed around with.

However, in an idle moment (of which I have many) I asked myself the curious question “What if someone at Pontiac suggested that maybe they could add a new, bolder interpretation of the side spear used on the ’57 cars?”.

So I set to work. This kind of thing tends to be casually referred to as “Photoshopping” but in fact it was mostly done in PowerPoint, an app which is frequently mocked because of all those naff presentations that people turn out, but you can’t blame PowerPoint for that. It actually has some quite useful graphics tools for drawing and colouring lines and shapes and blending images together.

So for anyone who is tempted to try fooling around with perfectly nice images without using Photoshop, here is how I went through the various stages illustrated.

1. Open the original image in PowerPoint and if necessary drag it to a suitable size so you can see what you're doing.

2. For the first chrome line I was aiming to include a kind of "mirror image" of that body crease running down to the rear wheel arch. I used the "curve" option in "Insert shapes". Drag the line and click where you want to fix a sharp change in direction. If drawing with the mouse rather than a graphics pen you will probably get an fairly approximate wobbly line.

3.  Right-click the shape and select "Edit points". That gives you points that you can drag, add or delete to refine the shape to taste.

4. Select the finished shape and click "copy" and move it to a clear area of the slide or preferably to a new blank slide to work on it.

Trying to simulate a chrome strip using a single colour hardly ever looks right because chrome picks up different shades and may have a bright highlight on the upper edge and shadow along the bottom. My solution (not perfect but OK) is to make a couple of copies of the shape (hold down the left mouse button to show a "+" sign and drag a copy).

5. Make the 3 copies different colours and/or widths. It's just a matter of experimenting to find what looks convincing and whether you need more lines or if maybe just two will create the desired effect.

6. Nudge the lines together then select them all (hold down left mouse button and drag around outside the shapes then let go) and use the "Group" function. This welds them together into a single object that can be moved around, resized or rotated as required. Note that if there is a serious curvature in your chrome strip, the three shapes will need to be a fraction different in width and/or height in order to "nest" inside each other. PowerPoint lets you select each shape and set the height and width manually to a fraction of a millimetre, which can be easier than trying to drag them to fit using the image corner handles. It also lets you reposition objects very precisely. The up-down-left-right arrows on your keyboard will move a selected object by 10 pixels per click, but if you hold down the Control key the object moves by just one pixel per click, allowing fine tuning.

7. Copy and drop the chrome strip onto the original image and use the image handles to re-size or reposition as required.

8. The process was then repeated for the lower chrome strip.  Reshaping the convertible roof to make a hardtop and adding chrome ribbing to the base of the roof pillar was also done by drawing and colouring simple PowerPoint "shapes".  But the new wheels and the chrome stars were imported from online images (and I admit I did have to use Photoshop to lift them from their backgrounds).

So there you are. An embarrassingly tacky-looking "embellishment" of a perfectly fine-looking automobile, and some information and guidance you never asked for and will never use. But if you are sat there on the toilet and things are going a bit slowly this morning, you may just be grateful for a bit of casual reading on your laptop to get you through it. Always happy to oblige.