That's a tough one.. Whenever I have shadow issues, I always turn to the "move the light" tutorial under the learn menu.. I've never used it though on such an extreme case of shadows.. It's worth a shot though..
move the light tutorial
if you want to post or email the full size one I would be glad to take a look at it and can make notes and what not on what I do and give you the PSD file after... I cant touch the thumb right now as Im at work and it would land me in a heap of trouble :P but Im in the process of building my new quad core puter at home and will need stuff to try on it :)
I messed around with your photo just a little bit. Mostly using a cloning tool. I did use a little dodge and burn as well as a smudge here and there to take out some of the stretch marks, but 90% of it was done with the clone tool.
I would also thinking about using the noise filter and median noise and then brining back the detail in all the other areas leaving just 4 or 5 pixel blur on the areas you are trying to smooth out.
wowo bugz, that is 0384720394852093485 imporvement than the original. Now where did you clone the skin from, as when i cloned it just looked as bad as it had before but now with blotcy skin
I took it right from the edges of the shadow, 15-30% Opacity. Alot of Brush Size changes. Probably about 3000 clicks total.
Originally posted by JulietNN:
wowo bugz, that is 0384720394852093485 imporvement than the original. Now where did you clone the skin from, as when i cloned it just looked as bad as it had before but now with blotcy skin
I think what he's saying is that he changed the opacity of his brush to 15-30% when painting over the dark areas. This lightens the area with a good skin tone a little at a time, rather than just cloning one part of the image directly onto the other. The changes are more subtle and look better.
I took his edited image and just did a little dodging and burning to create some shape:
ok I am tired of looking at her butt, so was just trying different things and ended up with this. [thumb]670439[/thumb]
I know it is kinda weird, but I think I like it. I like the sharpness of her feet and the rest of her sort of disolving into what looks like a charcoal drawing.
