Livery help... not request.

[Frogiton]

So I made myself a livery but I have a few questions. First off, is there anyway I can make my own shadowing to make it look a little more realistic and if so, how do I do it? And next, is there anyway I can smooth the picture out because it seems like there are quite a few rough edges? I used gimp even though I have PS CS5 because I felt that gimp was easier to use and make curves with. The model kit is from the Jetabout website.

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[zorbon]

Multiple ways to do it...

1) take the color you want to shadow... say red, use eyedropper to get the red color, click on the color and make it darker (pull the color selector downward toward black)

2) Get a brush, make it black, set opacity to a lower number, say 30% then draw over top what you want to shadow... (do it on a new layer.)

3) Quick way to do it, get the paint can tool (filler tool) turn it into a gradient(Alpha to black with opacity at ~30%). Fill in a new layer, then fiddle with layer settings (color burn, multiply, etc)

[Sami]

Use the ready-made AWS templates to get a layered blank aircraft with ready shadowing etc.

[Dave4468]

Use the ready-made AWS templates to get a layered blank aircraft with ready shadowing etc.

That would be a good solution if there was more than an A330 and a DC-8.

[raptorva]

it looks like you're not using layers there.
When I make liveries (not my current photo-manip one for BIA mind of a BAC-1-11) I get the base template, change the mode to RGB and then colour to alpha the white so its just the lines left. I then make a white layer UNDER the template and that forms my background. I then add transparent layers still under the template layer which I do the colours (I usually have one for base, one for tail, one for engines and one for decals) and then for the shading I use the gradient and magic wand tools.

[Frogiton]

I am in fact using layers for my plane. I am using four layers (body/decals,engine,details,white background). The three kit layers all had transparent backgrounds and foregrounds. I had to put a background layer because when I loaded it as .jpg without it, the background ended up as the most dominant color (blue). I made upper lighting on the plane and engines by putting a layer mask on the body and engine layers and setting a black to white gradient. I'm still figuring out how to put shadowing on the underside but I'm still going through Rawrmasters ideas and experimenting with putting the AWS A330 shadow and modifying it. Thanks for the help guys, here's what I've got so far. 

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