smoothen creases

[saigon80]

Hi everyone,
Could you please look at the attached image and help me out with crease smoothing. I've tried high-low frequency method but it seemed do not work because the texture here is very detail.

With your big help, I hope it would be an useful topic for everyone works in fashion retouching field.
Thank you in advance!

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3...t42/crease.jpg

[klev]

Re: smoothen creases

There's no really easy way to go about this if you want the creases gone. The reason is that the creases occupy a large area, and they are very very different from the surrounding material. Your best bet for blending them somewhat would be to darken the brighter areas somewhat. You can keep some of that highlight along the thigh, but the rest of it should be deepened. That is by far the easiest method to deal with something like this. You won't be able to achieve really good results just brightening the shadows to the level of the surrounding area. If you want to do that, get ready to pull from several frames and frankenstein it together.

On a side note it was shot poorly if they didn't want creases. The obvious thing would be not to have her left leg so far forward. That way the fabric wouldn't shift so much. You would have a fairly static pose, but this really isn't an ideal way to photograph this outfit.

[saigon80]

Re: smoothen creases

Hi Klev,
Thanks for your guide. Ialso thought of using lighten darken but I did not success in some trials. Here is my second try with high & low frequency, mask back some transition area. What's your thought ?

[klev]

Re: smoothen creases

Hi Klev,
Thanks for your guide. Ialso thought of using lighten darken but I did not success in some trials. Here is my second try with high & low frequency, mask back some transition area. What's your thought ?

It's about what I expected, which is why I suggested against it. I don't care for the results, but I would also have trouble if I used the same strategy. If you do really want lighter wrinkles, you might want to gather reference imagery. They look a bit different than this, and there's the inevitable issue of trying to get something that looks decent in terms of texture.

[AKMac]

Re: smoothen creases

I think you've made huge progress with your second try, and you should continue to refine that till it works tonally. Once you're happy with the tones, you can go back and finesse the texture.

[jklier]

Re: smoothen creases

Using dodge & burn can be used to take the edge of and make the slightly less noticeable, but you can't make them go away. The problem is that fabric has considerable texture that catches light. That texture didn't get captured in the shadow, and has to be tamed in the lit area.

Careful fabric crafting is more or less the only way to do it. But doing it on such large areas is non-trivial by far without creating obvious pattern artifacts and detail loss in the transitions.

Your best bet may be create copy layers that take good fabric, move them to cover the bad creases, carefully mask, and then use a curves with clipping masks to adjust luminosity to match the transition zones. Then carefully clone out any details that make the pattern obvious.

Tedious. If you have more than one image, run the numbers and see if the client wants to reshoot. It may be cheaper. Or maybe you convince them to live with it.

Ideally everyone wants to have a perfectly flat fabric, but there is some truth in advertising here. If that skirt creases easily, that's a fact that shouldn't be swept under the rug ;-)

[Caravaggio]

Re: smoothen creases

I think the fabric looks good in that you have maintained the texture, but the creases themselves don't look right. In a contrapposto pose like the model is in, the wrinkle nearest the knee would be more pronounced than the others on account of one leg being further in front of the other. The other wrinkles would be secondary and should be more subdued. As they are now in the retouch, the wrinkles that you kept are kind of distracting. I would burn them out a little more and maybe add back a hint of the wrinkle near the bottom that you took out.

The wrinkles in the original don't look fluid and organic as they are perfectly parallel to each other. In a pose like the model is in, the wrinkles would have one common point of origin near the hip where they seemed to converge and would grow more distant from each other the further down the leg they travelled. Maybe you could warp them a little so they had more of an arc , were less stiff and not perfectly parallel to each other?

[saigon80]

Re: smoothen creases

Thank you Caravaggio, your eyes on reality are so great, like you are from art school.
I've learned lessons from you .

[Caravaggio]

Re: smoothen creases

You are very welcome saigon. Glad I could help. You are kind of right, I had to draw drapery in art school. If you like drapery and want to learn more about it, look at partially clothed antique greek statues. A lot of them have one weight bearing leg and the other leg forward as in your image and you will see how this pose affects the wrinkling of the fabric.