A hip that just will not go away

[Sistere]

Hi Guys,

I've got a scanned image I am retouching and I am encountering a tough spot along the hip/panty line. Since its just one spot I am having a prob with I have cropped that specific area so that I could get it as large as possible for upload and viewing.

Up in the corner of the image I have also pasted a small thumb of the exact area I am trying to get rid of. I have tried cloning but I can't seem to get a good enough source to look realistic. I have warped and liquefied it but that is just blurring and smudging the sounding areas to much.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions. Also, I am not requesting anyone do it for me because I want to learn and I also need to be able to duplicate your results in the full size image so if you can suggest something, please let me know what you did. Just basic steps, enough to get the concept.

I hope everyone is geared up for a great holiday next week.

Damien

[Alison]

Hi Damien,

Are you trying to get rid of the dark area, or the little indent made by the string on the girl's panties ?

[Sistere]

Hi Alison,
That entire dark area that the string leads in to. If you look at the curves just above the panty string you can see the natural highlite of the obliques and hip bone. The angle of the shot also caught that dark lower back/upper butt area and thats what I need to remove (Check out the area in white in the thumbnail inside the photo - upper left)

Thanks!

[duwayne]

I'm not an expert in female anatomy so I just did what looks good to me. I use cut/paste and free transform on her right hip reshaping the copied parts to blend. I also think her left hip/stomach could use some work. I borrowed parts from her left forearm to slim her stomach.

[crazyfly1]

Damien,
This was fast and on my laptop (yuk).
I made a selection of the hip area to be removed and on over to the wrist/hand. Then took that into liquify and in one stroke the hip was gone. Bck to photoshop then the hardest part is cleaning up the damage in the form of blur, to the couch or whatever the blue is behind.

[Alison]

Hi Damien,

This is a very cheap and nasty rendition.

I took a patch from the lighter skin area above the hip with the lasso tool, copy pasted it into a new layer and duplicated that - now have two patches. Place them next to each other and you now have something to clone, heal etc., with. From there you can fix it up with some cloning, burning and dodging.

I tried the shadow/highlight feature and that worked reasonably well, but you would have to mask off the areas that you wanted the effect to be on.

[Alison]

Oops!, posted the pic before I did the other part of the dark area

[Alison]

Back again Damien,

I used the warp tool to push in the girl's hip area. Before doing that I took a patch from the lounge and once the hip 'disappeared' a bit, I made the patch fit. Used some dodge and burn also to make it blend in a little bit more (don't know if that worked ) She looks a little angular around the waist area in my rendition, it will need curving a little bit more.

[Ziaphra]

I think that hip is natural and very feminine...down to the 'twiggy' style photos! Lightening it will do the trick.

[drouber]

Some cloning, D&B and copy/paste of smal image parts.

[Alison]

Originally Posted by Ziaphra

I think that hip is natural and very feminine...down to the 'twiggy' style photos! Lightening it will do the trick.

I have a tendency to agree with you, if you start slimming down one side then you have to do the other side ... and it turns into an endless drama.

[Flora]

Originally Posted by Ziaphra

I think that hip is natural and very feminine...down to the 'twiggy' style photos! Lightening it will do the trick.

I couldn't agree more!!!

Also, obviously the model isn't standing straight, but seems to be 'putting the weight' entirely on her right leg, therefore, her hip bones aren't horizontally aligned and this makes the waist line on her right side much more at an angle than the left side .... I would simply correct the lightening as Ziaphra said ... and minimize the noise ... and even though everybody did a great job in cloning, warping etc. , if a change at all, I find Alison's the most 'anatomically' natural of all..

[shaybshay]

This is the first time I’ve tried sculpting a body. I am an amateur and found it very difficult. I cut the hip/butt area that you showed just above the knuckle up to about where your example ended using Polygonal Lasso Tool. This of course left a very unnatural straight line through the models body. I then went to copying sections of the blue cushion to fill the blank areas. Using a lot of erasing, cloning and opacity and such I tried to follow the natural upward flow of the cushion as it went diagonal from left to right, also trying to follow its natural light flow that fades down from right to left. I then went to the quilt and cloned downward toward the models body filling in the empty area.

I now went back to work on the straight line left by the lasso tool to give a natural curve. This took a lot of back and forth cloning between the body and the cushion. I would clone at a size 2 pixel and a hard edge at 100% opacity. I would zoom in and out of the document, while cloning for the curve, from 100% to 500% back and forth many times to achieve a natural curve. You must make sure you are viewing the document at 100% or else you will see things that aren’t really there, I’m not exactly sure how to explain that, it’s like pixels get messed up or something when viewing at different percentages.

Now that I was happy with the curve I noticed the shadow of the body now didn’t really match the curve. So I went to work on that, lots of copying, pasting, screen, cloning, painting, and blurring trying to match the curve. I think the shadow needs more work, reducing it a bit from the hip toward the belly more but I’m not sure.

So now there is a nice S curve, hourglass type shape with the body and the shadow. I also noticed there is a hard edge around the edge line of the body and arms so I went back to the curve’s edge and gave it a bit of sharpness to match everything else. I also cloned the bikini string and made sure there was a slight indent in the body where the two met.

Walking away for a while and coming back to it, I guess you could push the right side in more but I feel her body is body is a few degrees rightward from dead on so I think you would lose some of the hourglass shape on that side anyway simply because of camera perspective. Also looking at your original then looking at this example can make it seem unnatural. I find it best to close the original, leave only the rework open on the screen, don’t look at it for a long time, forget about it all and come back to view it later and see how you feel about it. I like to do this with all my retouches and so forth; it helps to see it as its own photo rather than a comparison.

Well I found this challenging and fun. I hope what I’ve detailed is close to what you are looking for. Like I said I’m an amateur and do this mainly to learn. Hopefully you and others can reply so I can learn form you all. Well take it easy now. -Shay

P.S. It's too bad about the small file size I had to give this. I noticed quite a bit of degrading in the shadow area and such when I opened it, but you get the idea anayway.

[KR1156]

you can't make the right call without seeing the image in its entirety.

[superkoax]

Originally Posted by KR1156

you can't make the right call without seeing the image in its entirety.

second that! I think that the hip looks natural! I would keep it for the feminine aspect of this picture! But as said: WHOLE PICTURE, PLEASE