Rate my Photoshop lowering job, and other ?'s

[FatfreeGTO]

So I like to mess around with PS sometimes and today I spent about 1.5 hours attempting to lower my car. I'm just wondering what you guys think of how I did. It seems to me there has to be an easier way then what I did, so I'm curious what steps you guys use to do yours.

Before
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After:
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Also does anyone have any advice on how to turn the following photo into one of those renderings you see all the time? I don't have a clue about that.
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[bhcustomdesigns]

Looks good!!! :twothumbs

[svtmeteor]

Its not to bad, but with the lower your going to have to apply a semi transparent layer of black under the tire to show the shadowing. As for turning it into a rendering, its a full bore job that involves gradients mostly, transparencys for reflection help, and will involve multiple layers to overlap, etc...If you want to learn to render, I would suggest using adobe illustrator over photoshop, it really allows you to work so much more with the shapes, and its vector layers instead of raster, so you can reshape everything with ease if need be. Also its not always a short job, sometimes its 1-2 hours, sometimes its 2-3 weeks, just depends on the car. Its worth trying at least once though, because once you get it, its so much fun.

[FatfreeGTO]

Alright thanks for the tips!