How to make cars looks waxed, when really they were not.

As allot of people know about me is I really dont do much photoshop at all, because one I dont have it and I don't use it if I can help it. Allot of stuff can be done in camera it just takes a good eye when looking though that viewfinder to see what is right and wrong in the shot before taking it and acting like an ape after, reviewing the shot on your screen. Here I have tried many kind of flash techniques but this is often forgotten by many because its too bulky and that is using large umbrellas to make cars shine.

The big deal about using an umbrella is that it softens the light and isn't harsh because it is not direct. You can imagine light being harsh when you look at pics from photographs of people taken with a camera with just the pop up flash. That flash exposes everything! If you have a cut, a pimple, bad skin, lots of stray hairs, it will show with direct flash! If you were to apply this to a car, you would see soo much dirt and dust it looks ugly! Unless the car is clean, then you don't have to worry to much, but the overall finish will look dull if it isn't cleaned professionally.

What can be done is to take your flash off camera and put the biggest modifier you can on it! That could be anything from a a soft box, umbrella, a bed sheet, or a front windshield head reflector, ANYTHING! It will work better if it was designed to reflect flash light, but you must understand you will need major power to get some good shots because it will eat up some light. I personally had 60" umbrellas and small speedlights, but I can make them powerful by kicking up my ISO. Many photographers forbid you to go up in ISO because of how clean the file will look like once it gets onto a computer monitor, but honestly if you have a good enough camera and a good enough lens you can forget about it. Semi professional and professional cameras are designed to perform in high ISO settings so it only makes you more capable to take shots with many kinds of light sources in my case, speedlights. If you don't have something like that, hopefully you have a good noise reduction program and you will be fine for the most part.

Take a look at the results of direct light vs reflected light  and a quick pick of a few of the lights:

1/10 f8 ISO 200 Note: Direct flash

1/10 f11 ISO 400 Note: Using 60" Reflective Umbrellas

Set up:

One light and a umbrella aimed at the hood

One light and umbrella at front wheel

One light and umbrella at rear wheel