I wanted to throw in my ideas on windshields because I do it a tad bit different as usual. Maybe I learned the hard way I don't know. Some artists set windsheild layer to white or black and some airbrush the proper shading to acheive a realistic bend in the glass and obtain a light reflection. I use the reflected gradient tool because it provided the proper amount of bend and reflection required. Very little adjustment or guesswork involved. You can easily do a windshield every time. OK, let's get started. First chop the entire bike from background. I do recommend using the pen tool at least for the windshield area. Here is the starting image and then the bike chopped out to a new layer (BIKE)
Now select the entire windshield and load to a new layer (WS), Looks like this now
Select everything in the windshields view that you want to remain and send to a new layer (FACE) This layer resides under the WS layer.
Load yourWS layer as a selection and then click on the BIKE layer. Change foreground color to r-58, g-58, b-58 and fill the entire windshield area with dark gray. Should look like this.
Now while the windshield is still selected, go to "Select - Modify - Contract" and contract the selection one pixel then hit your delete key. Now your BIKE layer should look like this:
Alright, let's shade the glass. Change colors to default (BLK/WHT) and choose the gradient tool. Set its mode to reflected gradient at the top. This is a great tool. You will click and drag and when you let go a graduated color pattern will emerge. The trick is, where do you click? The first click will be the middle of your desired gradient area and the distance that you drag before letting go will be the width of the foreground color in the gradient. Due to the sunset in my new background, I am going to click about 1/3 of the way from the left of the WS and drag about the distance of 1/3 of the WS. So go ahead and load the WS layer as a selection prior to performing this step and apply the above mentioned gradient to the WS layer. Should see this now:
Now you can adjust as nessecary to acheive the desired results. I use a lower opacity than most of the others use. Most of the time it is 25 to 40. I used 25 in this one. If the sun is hitting the windshield, I duplicate the WS layer on top of itself and change the layer mode of the top layer to "multiply" I leave the opacity at whatever I set the bottom WS layer, 25 in this case. The last step is to select the WS layer and load as a selection, apply a guassien blur of .7 to the shield for a realistic look and you are done. This is the final image with background replaced.
Hope it helped, Have a great day!
choppin up a windshield 101
