Tutorial creating a livery for GPRO feb 2018

Fase 1 – designing a livery. The steps of designing a livery are covered in the Photoshop tutorial. Tools etc may differ from program to program, but the basics with working in layers is the same. Some basics are explained below. Fase 2 – making a livery ready for upload. For the liveries to work best in GPRO we following some guidelines / rules. One main reason is that the layers in a template work together to create the best effect of shadow and light. The other reasons is that in GPRO itselfs we also use layers for the (animated) effects like rain tyres and smoke etc. If you fail to follow them you will end up with a livery which will create unwanted effects once the animated layers are applied for situations in the race. The exact position of the tyres is critical. That is the reason why we are strict on the usage of the templates. Liveries shall be created with one of the templates for team liveries that can be found in the wiki sections. The end results consist of two images: one 50x100 px canvas size and the other 150x300 px (300% view), both transparent (GIF with 256 colors or 24bit PNG) and with the correct shading applied. Changing the shape of the car is not allowed.

Fase 1 – designing a livery.

Basic start. Noticed the layers. This one with all the colors is best used as a start.

Here you can see the effect of the extra layers which make up the car: the shadow, the tyres and suspension and the shading of the car. The left image is what you design. The right is the end result.

You are welcome to add extra layers if needed. Just make sure they are below the layer “3 - light/shadow between 85-100” and above the layer “X – shadow”. Note – we will add the new tyres to the templates some time soon. Sometimes when designing you go outside the designated area (yellow in the example). That is okay, provided you ‘cut’ you final design to the designated area once you complete designing.

Fase 2 – making a livery ready for upload. Once you are satisfied with the design and the shading you are ready to export the image. Be sure to save the file have so far! The end result is a file in GIF format and size 50*100 pixels. This is the car used in the liver races. The image is EITHER a file in GIF format and size 150*300 pixels OR a PNG 24 bit file in 150*300 pixel size. This file is used for your team-page of personal page. Step 1 – copy past the final design.

Copy the merged image (= the option that you copy WYSIWYG) and paste it as new image. It should only have one layer after pasting. And you paste it twice as new image. Alternatively you can merge all layers together in the source file, BUT if you save it as merged file you lose all the work in the separate layers!!

Step 2 – resize one of the copied files to 50*100 pixels. Make sure you use the ‘ intelligent’ option for the best resize results. Other options will usually be more pixel-ish.

Step 3 – area for transparency Now we to the same in both files: replacing the grey background with pink. The pink color will be transparent in the final stage. If for some reason you have this exact color in your livery, you should choose a different color. Otherwise the pink in your design will become transparent too.

Important: you may wonder why we resize first and then add the pink. If we do it the other way around, the program will create different shades of pink/grey around the edges of the car when resizing. The program calculates a sort of mean color. This different shades of pink will not be transparent in the end process. Choose the fill bucket tool and color the outside grey pink as well as the bits between the front tyres and wing.

Be sure not to set the tolerance too high (0 or 1 will work fine), otherwise you will color too much grey (shadow). Also check for rough edges, which sometimes appear because the grey color used there is the exact same as the background color grey . Rectify any edge or gap you see.

Cleaned up it should look like this. Next step (4) is to export the smaller car to a transparent GIF.

Choose the export function or save as function of your program.

It is important to pick the color you wish to be transparent, in our case the pink, with 0 tolerance (= meaning we need it to be this exact color).

Other possible options for telling the program what to do with partial transparency.

Further options are the use of the full 256 pallet, and tell the program what to do with colors if you used more than 256 colors. These options will give you the best result. If you have a very colorfull design, PSPro will ‘round of’ nearby colors to one color and you should expect some loss of nuance.

When satisfied, press okay and give the car a name. Repeat this process for the image of 150*300 pixels. Save the PSP-file. You do not need to save the 2 other files used for the export.

Exporting to PNG

Choose the PNG export (or save as) function. You can choose 16. mil colors

Be sure to choose one color (pink) with 0 tolerance and one-color transparency. There are different paths and processes to the same result, but they all have the risk that you lose details of your design because of applying transparency in the final process. Press OK and give the file a name