Painting clothes in Photoshop - step four

Ok. Still with me? It hasn't appeared to be that important until now, but are you thinking about where the light in your scene is coming from? Wait- you are thinking about the light aren't you?!? Aren't you?? Because now it really matters.

It may seem like I've done quite a bit of work since the last step. Maybe not as much as you think. Let's walk through it.

First of all, I've decided to go with more of a cream color for her blouse. I duplicate the blouse layer (you can just drag the layer in the layer palette over the new layer button, and it will create a duplicate layer). I do this so I can experiment without making any permanent changes. I hit CTL-U to bring up the hue/saturation menu. Clicking the "colorize" button, I play with the sliders until I've got a color I'd like to start working with. Clicking on the "ok" button, I get get to work on the fun stuff.

Now let's work on some shadows. What you see on the right is a combination of working with the burn and dodge, smear and airbrush tools. I'll hit a few shortcut keys as I work between them:

J - airbrush
O - burn and dodge
I - eyedropper
R - smear and blur
CTL-Z - One of the pleasures of digital art... the ability to undo your last action. Lovely.

When you are using the airbrush, you can also hold down the ALT key to turn your brush icon into the eyedropper, enabling you to sample from part of the blouse nearby. Saves a lot of time over having to choose the eyedropper. It also helps in getting the subtle shading we are looking for in the shadows we are looking for. After all, we are thinking about the light constantly, right?

Don't forget the valuable tool of transparency protection. When desirable, check the box on the layer palette that protects transparency for that layer. That way you can paint without worrying about going outside the boundaries of your clothing. If you want to change the shirt, just uncheck the box and paint away.

Working on the laces, I can be happy that I rendered large. I use the burn tool to darken the bottom edges, and the dodge tool to lighten the top edges. I set a small brush to around 20% opacity, making sure I make only small changes at a time. I won't vary size with pressure with either the burn tool, or the airbrush at this point.

For some of the creases, I set the layer opacity to 85% or so, just enough to see the underlying body. That way I can get the folds underneath her breasts and armpits right without guessing. Once I've done just a bit there, I up the opacity back to 100% on the layer.

After getting a few of the folds in, I'll gently, very sparingly use the smear tool to move the cloth around. Be careful. It's very easy to overuse this tool... pretty soon your painting can look, well...like a smeared mess. So far, I've mainly used it on the pull in the cloth created by the laces.