Advice for bright dress and armpit area

[BaerenBim]

Hi there!

I hope someone from this lovely forum can give me some advice. I am retouching my own wedding photos after my photographer had an emergency c-section the day before my wedding and I could only find an amateur for the day.

So far I've had a lot of success with evening skin tone and bags under the eyes. The two main problems I see with a lot of photos now, are
1) Quite often the skirt of my dress appears super white with no detail. I tried the burn tool for this but it seems to make the dress grey. I also tried to create a new layer with a mask but it still didn't look right
2) A lot of photos have an unflattering bit of fat hanging over near my armpit. I'd like to take part of the crystal bodice and transfer it over this fat flap to hide it a bit. For inside shots, I achieved this reasonably well with the clone tool but it seems to go horribly wrong in the outside shots.

I would really appreciate if someone could suggest which tools I should be using (I have photoshop cs4). I hope it's okay that I cut out the heads of our photo...

Thank you for taking the time to read this and sorry if it was too long,
BaerenBim

[Der_W]

For the dress you could try to select it (I used the quick select tool) and run the "Image"-"Adjustments"-"Shadows/Highlights"-filter on it (I used only the highlights, 50-40-380).
After that you maybe have to use Hue/Saturation and desaturate the dress a bit as it's getting a little blue.

For the armpits I used the "Filter"-"Liquify" and the clone stamp on a new layer. Sometimes you'll need to warp the cloned areas, so that's why I used a new layer.
But really, I should have done a better job, I'm in a little hurry right now, sorry!

[mistermonday]

For the dress, I would recommend you open the image in Camera RAW. Adjust the Recovery slider to recover the highlights in the dress a little. The dress also has a strong purple / blue cast. Go to the HSL/Grayscale Panel and reduce the Saturation slider all the way to the left in the Purple and Blue channels. Go back the the main panel and increase the Fill slider to bring back details in the groom's tux.
For the arms, a combination of the patch tool, healing brush, and stamp tool over the crease should reasonably attenuate the flab.
Regards, Murray

[Cupcake]

I agree with the Camera Raw for the color.

On the arms I used the Liquify tool, heal tool and then smoothed it out with the brush tool.

[BaerenBim]

Thank you all so much for the help I appreciate the time you took as it has helped me a lot!!!