Carbon Fiber Tutorial

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This how to will show you how to get that carbon fiber look on a hood, or any other part you find worthy of 'fibering.

First thing you need to do is make a carbon fiber pattern to use. Make a new document that's 12x6 pixels in size and has a transparent background.

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Now select the top left corner and fill it diagonally with a black to white gradient. Do the same with the bottom right corner.

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Now define the pattern you've created.

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Name the pattern and click ok.

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Alright. Now that we have that out of the way, we can start on the car. Open your picture and select the part of the vehicle to be carbon fibered.

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Make a new layer via copy.

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Desaturate the newly made layer.

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Go to brightness/contrast and darken the layer a bit.

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Next, go to fill layer.

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Find the pattern you made earlier and click ok.

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Rasterize your new fill layer.

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Now go adjust the perspective.

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Make it so it looks good compared to the angle of your original image.

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Then give it a little twirl.

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Now to select just the hood, you hold command and click on the hood layer (You should have 3 layers. The original, the hood layer, and the pattern fill layer. I know in some of these pics I have an extra layer. Disreguard that.) The command click is for Macintosh. For PC it might be Alt click or control click.

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Select inverse.

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After you've selected the inverse, just press delete. It should look like this afterwards.

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Now lower the opacity of the fill layer a bit.

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Ok, now combine the pattern fill layer and the hood layer. Now you should only have 2 layers. The new carbon fiber hood layer and the original image. Lower the opacity of the hood layer a little.

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Finally, merge the two layers. Tada, after a lengthy tutorial, you now have a carbon fiber hood (or other part). It seems long, but after you do it a couple times it goes pretty quickly.