Please give me some pointers (details please) on how to retouch this photo to let this person look thinner (toned) but at the same time realistic to their shape.

Do you have the original. It looks like you did some retouching through the chest area causing a lot of detail to be lost.

also, 'thinner' isnt an exact amount. how much thinner do you want to make it?

a quick reduction of a small amount would be to just put the arm 'over' the stomach. a bit of push/smudge/clone/airbrush would do it. if you want a large amount of 'thinner', it's going to take some work. normally, i like the warp mesh and warp brush for this type of work, but as you reduce the body, you'd have to add in some background between body and arm or pull the arm over to your new thinner body. so, the amount you want to do here is important.

Hello skydog

Two main parts... the first, mostly cloning, copying, and lighten or darken colors to minimize creases. For instance on the lower left side I drew a temp line from mid chest to pant line then cloned from left to right to remove main bulge. I needed to clone to reinsert button area where you removed lettering. Then cloned again to remove shadow.

On the right side I used the pucker tool in liquify. Then copied and flipped the arm to the right side.

Hope this helps
Butch

excellent, butch. i hadnt even thought of the camera right side. i was going to move it all from left to right and leave the other arm alone. but that works nicely.

Thanks Craig

I just wish I had a pucker tool to use on myself.. :nod:

There are a couple ways to approach this. I used the liquify filter, dodge and burn tool, and healing brush/healing patch tool.

Lots of steps, but basically I used the liquify filter to shrink and straighten areas using the push tool. The trick to the liquify filter is to work slowly. I pushed the areas in bit by bit instead of an all in one brush stroke.

Then I used the dodge tool to lighten the shadows of the shirt folds and the healing brush and healing patch tool to remove the fabric folds and puckering. I did this by sampling areas that did not have any folds. You can also use the dodge and burn tools to recreate folds.

I then added some space between the arm and body. I simply lassoed an area of the background, blurred the edges a bit and placed it over the arm.

Finally I adjusted the contrast and warmed up the photo.

Thank you...you gave me some good ideas.