How to Edit Car Photos
for Turo in 5 Minutes

By Quinton Heck · Charleston, SC

On Turo, your listing is the only thing a renter sees before they book, and on day one you're up against the same car with 40 reviews. Photos are one of the few things you fully control. I run a 12-car Turo fleet, and this is the edit I use on my listing photos: four steps, under five minutes, in Photoshop and Lightroom. Here's the whole process.

The video shows every step on a real photo, before and after, in six and a half minutes.

Step 1: Remove the competition

Most of us don't have an empty lot to shoot in. I don't. So the first thing I do when I open a photo in Photoshop is get rid of every other car in the frame. Doing that by hand used to take forever. Now generative AI does it with a click — select the car, ask it to remove it, done.

It's not quite as easy as one click every time. You have to play with what you select and what you type, because sometimes the AI invents something that obviously doesn't belong there. Run it again until the background looks like nothing was ever there.

Step 2: Fix the distractions

With the other cars gone, clean up the scene: sewer grates, random people, a rogue traffic cone. The goal is that nothing pulls the eye away from your car. Think of it like having someone over — nobody notices your nice couch if there's dirty laundry all over the floor.

I use generative AI for most of this too. For simple things like sewer grates I use Photoshop's pattern tool, because a parking lot is one repeating texture and you can copy the pavement right over the grate. I also use it to remove house and building numbers so I'm not publishing somebody else's address in my listing.

Step 3: Dress her up

This is where the car gets a little pop, and where it's easiest to overdo it. I stick to two things: lights and tint.

The rule for all of it: you want people saying "that's a nice car," not "nice edit." If it looks edited, you've gone too far.

One Turo-specific trick: sometimes I put something small and funny on the license plate — "RENT ME" — to catch a renter's eye while they're scrolling. Keep extras like that subtle. They should be the second thing someone notices, after the car.

Step 4: The final touch in Lightroom

Save out of Photoshop, open the photo in Lightroom, and do the color. I'll be honest, I'm not a Lightroom expert. I slap a preset on it. Here's what makes that work:

  1. Turn the preset down to 50–60%. At full strength it's usually too much.
  2. Fix exposure and temperature. The preset was built on someone else's photo, with different light and color balance than yours. Adjust those two sliders until it looks right on your photo.

Touch those sliders and the Lightroom step takes about 60 seconds. If you don't want to pay for presets, search "free Lightroom preset" on Google or YouTube — plenty of creators give one away in their description. I paid for mine and made some of my own. I don't sell them.

Why this matters more on Turo than anywhere else

Nothing in these four steps changes the car. It changes the background and the light, so the car is the only thing in the frame. When I list a new car with no reviews, I price it a little under the market and put real effort into the photos, because those are the only two levers a brand-new listing has. Here's how I handle the pricing side.

Half the work is AI. The other half is turning a preset down and fixing two sliders. That's the whole trick.

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Quinton Heck
Written by Quinton Heck

I'm a YouTuber in Charleston, South Carolina, and I run a 12-car Turo fleet full-time. This is the edit I use on my own listings. More about me.

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