Hi
I shot the following snap for my work, i have marked the problem area in white circles, they are dark due to shadow as result of folds in fabric,fabric is silk.
My question is how do i go about making dark area same to area that received proper lighting
Without seeing the picture I'd suggest either reshooting it without the folds or maybe dodging the darker areas. If possible, reshooting is always the better alternative.
I'd suggest putting it on a quilting frame. That way you could make the fabric wrinkle free. Then move your light low so the embroidery will have more shadows to make it stand out.
If you can't reshoot, you should be able to get a lot of this done with a clone or healing brush tool - you have lots of good identical sample areas around these dark spots.
I saved your picture and tried editing it but its just too complicated.. tried everything. Try shooting it with diffused light in front of it to soften the shadows. I think that should solve the problem.
You can do something simple like this quite easily (I spent about 30 seconds on it)
You can also completely remove the background if you prefer, but I kept some of the texture to make it look natural.
This was pretty trivial to do, just by selecting the gold pattern, inverting that selection and deleting the background, or replacing it with a layer of mostly the green colour and letting some of the original shadows show through.
I made a selection, using the red channel, expanded it by 1 pixel to avoid any aliasing problems and feathered it very slightly, then just deleted all the other channel info, to lift the pattern out on a new layer. From there, I stuck a green (sampled from the original) layer in between, and adjusted the opacity.
[Btw: this is a great example to show the power of channel driven selections, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago - it would be a hard task to select the pattern using lasso, or magic wands and stuff like that - it took one click to do it as an image driven selection - try it and see - go in to the channels, look at the red channel and Ctrl+click on it - you've selected all of the pattern now)
Gordon - once again thanks for posting this info....I'm definitely going to try this out later. I've had a hell of a time selecting things with the magic wand...almost useless on some subjects...
