TOYOTA | Automotive Retouching | Digital

Retouching – Toyota C-HR shown in a snow-covered landscape with crisp detailing and clean reflections.
Retouching – Close-up of Toyota C-HR panel surface, showcasing sharp edge work and enhanced material finishes.
Retouching – Toyota C-HR in a festive sunset scene, refined for contrast, colour, and premium highlights.
  • Retouching – Initial composite base layer featuring background gradient sky before any vehicle placement.
  • Retouching – Composite build continues with snowy mountain landscape added beneath the sky.
  • Retouching – Rear Toyota C-HR vehicle added and blended into the scene with early reflections and shadows.
  • Retouching – Composite refinement with ground layer and colour adjustments to unify car and background.
  • Retouching – Finalised Toyota C-HR winter scene with enhanced reflections, colour grading, and clean-up.

Toyota | The&Partnership

Advanced Automotive Retouching & Compositing

This campaign visual series for Toyota showcases high-end automotive retouching and compositing, created in collaboration with The&Partnership. The primary objective was to transform standard studio or location photography into evocative, marketing-ready imagery that embodied the sleek innovation and bold design language of the brand.

The creative brief demanded a heightened level of polish without losing realism — a balance that required meticulous Photoshop work. Each image was built through multiple layered composites, combining base car photography with carefully selected and enhanced backplates. In many cases, skies were replaced entirely to inject drama and visual contrast, while snowy mountain backdrops and colour-rich sunsets were integrated to elevate the setting and match the vehicle’s character.

Key to the success of the project was lighting consistency. Shadows were sculpted, and ambient light direction was harmonised between subject and environment to ground the vehicles convincingly within their new backdrops. Colour correction played a pivotal role — not just in balancing the overall image, but in ensuring paintwork, chrome, and glass read accurately and dynamically, capturing both materiality and intent.

Reflections were a particular focus. Car bodies are reflective surfaces by nature, and integrating convincing environmental reflections into curves, contours and windows involved a combination of hand-painted light wraps, masked overlays, and selective burn/dodge techniques. Tyre shadows were rebuilt to suit new terrain, and subtle effects like lens blur and sky gradients were used to draw the viewer’s eye and build depth.

The result is a premium visual series tailored for digital and print campaign use — one that tells a powerful brand story through the lens of technical craft. These assets serve as a testament to the role high-end compositing plays in creating automotive imagery that not only informs, but inspires.