Pictures for a Friend: 2017 Subaru BRZ Series.Yellow

A good friend of mine is looking to purchase a BRZ or two for his projects. But he lives in a part of Canada that does not have a lot of Subaru dealers and so asked me if I could photograph the Series.Yellow the dealership here had and a white and/or gray BRZ if the dealership had them. Unfortunately they only had the Series.Yellow.

A big reason for taking these photographs is that often times the pictures on the internet do not capture the color of a car correctly. But since I was at the dealership for a car detail, had my laptop, and had time, I was able to take the photos and then adjust white balance, saturation, hues, and gamma correction with the vehicle sitting there. The more deep the yellow shots that come after best capture the car.

Keep in mind though that I adjusted these on my laptop's LED based screen. Which is richer in appearance than my desktop's LCD based screens (they are old). That is one of the interesting things about color correcting after taking a photo is that depending on what you edit it on and view it on it will look different. I will likely work to better color correct photos in the future, I know some of mine have had pretty terrible coloring, especially red cars at auto shows. All of that said, onto the non white balance reference shots of the car and my thoughts on the upgrades.

First, I am not in love with the upgraded wheel and tire package. I do not particularly like the appearance of the wheels. The new wheels are 7.5" wide, I believe 0.5" wider than the stock wheels. But they are still using 215/45R17 tires. This means that the tires have this angular slope / bulge from the tire tread to the wheel rim. I think it would look better if there had used 215 width tires.
I do like that red Brembo brake caliper though.

I like the new one piece headlights, turn signals, and daytime running lights. I am not wild about the side vents being filled in and plastic, I would prefer if they were actual vents.

But overall I like the look of the revised bumper and I think it looks good and more aggressive than the per-update bumper. Also, they had a red pre-2016 BRZ at the dealer (somebody's car in for work) that had the front black bumper piece painted or swapped to appear body color. It actually looked really good and is something I would consider as an exterior modification in the future.

Yellow! Also, I dig the higher / thinner rear wing and the wing gap from the body at this angle.

Even more yellow! I also like the new front fender insert. It is no longer a fake plastic grill / vent, rather it is a solid body color piece with some plastic aero accents.

Again, I like the new rear ring and taillights. Also, yellow! (This photo probably does the best justice to the color of the car.)

And then the photo looking down at the trunk is a bit washed out of the yellow color as compared to the prior photo.

Even more washed out, lots of windows on this side, very hard to adjust the lighting correctly on my limited post processing software.

Taking interior shots increased challenges as due to lighting and white balance issues the color does not like to filter through properly.

Even more so here. The yellow on the seats is very light but not quite this washes out. The car is a mess of over saturation due to lower light available and focusing on the seats.

To the right you can see that the climate control knobs have been updated slightly. I like the new steering wheel it feels slightly meatier than my current one, perhaps a bit smaller. And the hand controls are a welcome edition. When commuting or road tripping these controls are very useful. The right side controls the right gauge cluster screen. (The yellow saturation in this photo is terrible, but I did not adjust between exterior and interior shots.)

I agree with Jalopnik's assessment that the new screen does look tacky and rectangular and that they tried to hide this fact by placing the rings over its face and dividing it. There have been much better screen placements and executions by other companies. That said I really like having the water temperature, oil temperature, and voltage gauges. Also using the up and down arros on the right side of the steering wheel you can scroll through current MPG / average MPG / remaining range in miles (or kilometers if you change the settings). You also have a distance, time, and average speed screen. You can change screens and have the HP / torque graph that will show where you are on the graph based upon throttle input (useless feature in my opinion); or the g-meter (also not super useful, but fun in the right settings); and lastly a lap timer feature. Overall I like the instrument cluster and head unit update, though I wish the head unit had the same leather surround that is in front of the passenger seat and that it was one piece.

Hopefully this has served as a nice little tour of exterior and interior changes for the 2017 BRZ Series.Yellow and informative regarding the trials and tribulations of capturing color correctly.