Help With Smoothing Wrinkles In Clothing

[SteveB2005]

Hello Retouchers. We all have had a go with smoothing out wrinkles in portraits, but what about "steaming" wrinkles out of clothing, but keeping film grain and resolution? I'm attaching an example that I'm working on right now. I have used the clone tool, healing brush, masking, but it is so laborious. I'm wondering if there are any tricks to get rid of "un-ironed" clothes at a faster pace. Any ideas on smoothing out ruffled fabrics?

Thanks for your help. steve

[KR1156]

use some curves, to darken or lighten, paint in the mask to reveal them.

basically you are d&b'ing. make a couple of different curves to hit 1/4, mids, 3/4 tones etc. eventually it will come together. only non-destructive method i can think of off the top of my head with that small sample.

put them in luminosity mode and you won't have a major color shift.

for the bigger more hard edged area...that will take more than that, might have to do somee cloning, but try darken and lighten modes to help. it will get sloppy no doubt, but then you can d&b the seams together to make it blend better.

you can always try cheating some areas with a little airbrushing with noise addes to make texture. it will prob be a combination of all mentioned above.

retouching laborious....never.

[0lBaldy]

Have you tried the patch tool set at source?

[Daviskw]

Hi there

You can also try the quiuck degrunge routine. Mask as needed

Butch

[SteveB2005]

Thanks KR for your advice. I'll mess around with some of these tips. It would be so much easier to throw these fabrics in a dryer with fabric softener, but of course we have to do a "digital ironing" in Photoshop to straighten it out. BTW, the sample I posted was just a low-rez version, but the actual files are very hi-res images and "steaming" them is not fun, but I have to create something almost perfect for the client.

BTW, here was an interesting thing I pulled off by accident. Because the org images are underexposed about 1 stop, I ran the exposure/highlight adj, and the fabric was magically wrinkle free. The problem of course was the image was brightened up and even with some masking, I couldn't get it right. If I could, it was an instant "ironing."

steve

[KR1156]

olbaldy pointed out the patch tool, which is a big time saver for certain jobs.
just hope you have large source/cover areas to really utilize it's power. just watch it's not destroying the natural texture of the fabric, (sofetning it where it's noticeable you were retouching it.)

if it's really hi-rez and for a client, than take your time and when you're in a good place, take a break, walk away from the screen, then go in deep and analyze your image like you were dexter.

you will have a fresh sety of eyes and will be able to spot to sloppy cloning/d&bing/healing/patching pixels. adding a slight bit of noise on a softlight layer will help you ease the transition of your tones and texture.

[vidrazor]

Hi folks, I just ran across this thread looking for similar info. While d&b works in most situations, I'd like some perspective when dealing with wrinkled fabrics with TEXTURE. I'm not referring to just a pattern on the fabric, but also a pattern and a texture in the fabric itself, like straight or curving ridges. This is hell. This is a different ball of wax and other than d&b I can't think of any tools that can be of help. Any suggestions?

In the past I've resorted to some drastic measures, such as if I have the fabric for color matching reference, I've literally thrown it up on a lightbox and shot a "patch" to hack back into the shot. Sometimes this works, sometimes if doesn't, but you get the idea. :-) Removing wrinkles for textured fabrics is pretty tough.

Thanks for any ideas.

[mistermonday]

Vidrazor, Frequency separation is often very effective to get the job done.
Regards, Murray

[chillin]

Just like Murray said, frequency separation with + D&B.

[vidrazor]

Thanks for your replies.

I wasn't familiar with this technique until just looking it up now. So are you saying I would d&b on the blurred layer while leaving the detail layer alone? I'm not sure this offers any advantage because a wrinkle on a fabric would distort both a pattern on a fabric, as well as any texture the fabric would have, such ridges. So I don't see the advantage to this technique.

[chillin]

Originally Posted by vidrazor

Thanks for your replies.

.... So are you saying I would d&b on the blurred layer while leaving the detail layer alone? ....

D&B + color adjustments on low frequency layer & texture healing on high frequency layer.

[vidrazor]

Thanks again for your replies. In all honesty, I don't see an advantage here to straight processes. Distorted patterns and textures need very discreet hacking to (hopefully) make it viable, and this approach to me only doubles the amount of work you need to do, with little or no real advantage. Or I should say that I'm not seeing where the advantage here is.

However, I did experiment with the HF layer and discovered that it makes for a great alternative to typical sharpening processes like Hi-Pass, Unsharp, and standard noise-based algorithms. Discarding the blur layer and applying the HF layer it as Vivid, Hard, Overlay of Soft with any given layer or fill percentage gives various levels of sharpening without the ringing effects typically found in all other sharpening processes. I think it may become my sharpening/datail process of choice from now on.

[Der_W]

Sharpening with the high pass layer has almost no advantage over using traditional methods like high pass or Smart Sharpen.

The benefit of using it when ironing clothes is that you can first work on the underlying form (e.g. get rid of shadows) without worrying about the texture, in the next step you can fix all the texture without worrying about the form.
In same cases that's a huge time saver, in others you're right, there's no benefit in using it :-).

[lkroll]

Not sure if this one counts, but I did large gaussean blur followed by retexturizing using the original as a displacement map reference.