Originally by Metal (Gian Carlo Minardi of www.pitwall.org)

The long-awaited tutorial for your liveries is HERE!

Well, part 1 is anyway. I've written this for Photoshop 7.0, but could be easily applicable to all other versions and possibly also some other programs - I'm sure stuff like GIMP has some variations on the tools I'm about to go through.

The purpose of this first part is to familiarise you with your program and make you aware of basic techniques you'll need to complete a livery the way I do. I warn you all now, my way of doing it usually takes an hour because I take my time and use layers like crazy. I'm sure there are faster ways of getting the job done, but my methods work for me as I can process it in my mind that little easier.

Anyways, fire up Photoshop. You'll be presented with a funky main screen, based on your colour settings for your computer. Mine is heavily blue, for example:


When people first open up PS, there's usually a lot more windows open on the right hand side, but the program is smart enough to remember what you had open before you closed it, what tool was selected, and what colours you had amongst other things. The windows on the right are tabbed like Firefox and IE, and if you click and hold on one, you can drag it to separate it from the other tabs to create a new box. We'll cover that in some more detail in a bit.


On the left I have highlighted the Tool Bar - silence, you at the back that knows this already.
This is going to be one of the most frequently visited areas whilst you're using the program, and if you hover the mouse above each of the tools it'll tell you what it is and what letter on the keyboard you need to press to activate it quickly - otherwise known as a shortcut. I use these quite a lot, but don't worry - I'll try not to talk over your heads about it.

From the top working down, I've highlighted the essential tools you'll need to use for a basic livery. The others are fancy an' stuff but not as essential as these basics.
First is the Marquee(click or press M to activate the rectangular Marquee). This is basically a way of drawing a box around an item you want to do something with - cut, paste into, copy, etc. You'll notice a small triangle in the bottom right hand corner of this box - it gives you various other options such as a circular box. We'll cover how to use it properly later.
Next is the one I should have selected but didn't because I was a numpty, the Magic Wand(W). It's down and to the right of the Marquee and selects areas of a particular colour. You can increase the tolerances and other stuff on a bar that pops up, again we'll come to it later.
Continuing down is the Brush(B). You can select either a normal brush(with a softer edge) or a pencil(for when you're doing precise pixel-by-pixel work). There is a bar that gives you various sizes and brush heads.... yep, covering it later.
Eraser(E) is next. Pretty simple, rubs stuff out.
Below is the Smudge/Blur/Sharpen tool(R). Currently selected is a pointy finger, which is the Smudge. The one we'll worry about is the blur.
Towards the bottom is a large-ish box I've selected, with a black and white pair of boxes in it. These are your Foreground and Background colours(press X to switch them around). Generally, I use this to select one colour and quickly switch to another stored on the Background palette. To change colour, click on it. To reset to the default b/w you can see, click on the smaller representation slightly to the left of it.


This is the second most important window to keep open, the Layers. Separate this from anything else on the right hand side, you won't need them. Layers are your best friend, and a valuable tool in itself. The top layer is the visible one, and anything underneath this is obscured by whatever is on top. This is the best way to make an outline and not worry about going over it with colour... again, we'll come to it later.


Now this is going to be your test livery, courtesy of whoever made it in the first place. We're not using my heavily-altered version as it's way too complicated to be using for this, what with the extra bits everywhere. For this first part, we're simply going to change its colour.
You need to have this image saved on your hard drive, then open it up in PS.

For some reason I've misplaced a version of the car in red with areas highlighted... bugger XD I'll try to talk you through it.
Basically, we need to remove the red and change it for our new colour. If you simply want to change colour, there's no need to delete the red but for the sake of practice, we're going to.
Select the Wand and look at the top part of the screen, underneath the options bar:

Look at the top red box I've highlighted - this is the third most important area after Tools and Layers. This area gives you options that are tool-specific. Here we have anti-aliasing and contiguous. Anti-aliasing rounds off any pixels selected to give a smoother look to it. For what we're doing this is BAD and this must not have a tick in the box next to it.
Contiguous on the other hand is sometimes handy. If selected, when you click on a colour it'll select every pixel of that colour until it finds a variation outside of its tolerances, to make a nice and easy way to select a block of colour - try clicking on an area of red to see what I mean. If you deselect the box, it'll select EVERYTHING that colour regardless of pixels blocking it from finding others. This is restricted to the one layer, unless of course you select the third option at the top... but I leave this off because it's asking for trouble.
Anyways, we want to remove all the red so deselect this box and click on one part of red, it should all be selected. Then hit Delete to remove it!


Has anyone messed up at this point and selected the wrong part? No problem - point the mouse anywhere inside the selection and it'll change into a white pointer. If you click, it deselects what you selected. If you hold down Shift whilst clicking, you can select additional areas of colour, not limited to the original you selected of course.
Has anyone clicked on a black part of the outline and deleted that by accident? No problem, hold down Ctrl and press Z to undo it. If you hold down Shift and Crtl whilst pressing Z you can jump back multiple steps as opposed to just one.


Here's an image of the car minus red, with the insides still selected. If you deselected it by accident, go and reselect it all with the Wand =P

Notice I've created a new layer - if you go back one image you can see the icon to click to get one. Create one, select it by clicking it, and drag it to the bottom by... dragging it. This is practice for layer work, so please do this.

Anyways, we need to change the colour of our car, don't we?

Remember the Foreground/Background button on the toolbar? Click on either one of those colours and this window pops up. What you have is a given colour - usually placed in the top right of this window - and white in the top left. These mix across the box to give variations of colour, and as the colour travels down it gets darker, the bottom being black. Probably made that sound more complicated than it needed to be... anyways. On the right of this is a scroller, allowing you to choose between different colours. Want that yellow? Click on it and the main window will show you all variations of that part of the spectrum. For this I'm using a most vibrant blue and I'm moving that pointer in the centre all the way to the top right of the box once I've picked the right blue on the slider. On the very top right there is a preview of what you currently have selected, and what you want to select once you've hit OK. This is very useful for if you want to alter the colour slightly once you've selected it.

Anyway.

With the areas you want to colour still selected, click on the Marquee - any of them will do, the only difference is the line they draw.
Right click with this inside the selection - making sure you're on the blank layer - and you'll see this list pop up. As you can see, we're looking at a highlighted Fill so click on it. It'll then ask you whether you want to fill the selected area with the foreground colour, background colour, or something else(if you go with something else, this automatically becomes your new foreground colour). Pick the foreground colour you selected and...


Ta-daaah! Your first livery!
Yes, that was a bit too simplistic but as I said before, it's designed to introduce you to some basics of Photoshop and also to help you separate the outline from the livery itself. See on the right, the Layers window? The outline will sit on top, and so long as you draw on a layer beneath it the outline won't be affected. And if you stray over it, you can use the Eraser to rub it out, again not affecting the outline!
Next to each layer you'll see an eye - click on this to make each layer visible or hidden. This can be useful for when you're working on something with multiple layers.


Next time out I'll introduce y'all to the next step - sponsors and the Transform tool. We'll be using the Marquee tool a lot more, as well as layering. In the meantime, practice this little one and post up your efforts here if you feel like it. Part 2 will be about this time tomorrow, as I'm working 12-5 tomorrow afternoon.