How to indicate or extract wrinkles, based on photo, with Adobe Photoshop?

Question

I want to take out all the wrinkles and folds from shirt image and save in new file.

I mean is it possible to remove all other colors from shirt and leave only wrinkles in it? So we can paste those wrinkles on some other shirt image?

For Example I have this shirt

You can see that there are wrinkles and folds in shirt's arm etc. I want to remove everything and just leave those wrinkles. So I can paste those wrinkles on my other shirt photos.

My target is that I have been given plan fabric pictures and now I have to make those pictures like they have wrinkles as in the above picture. But I don't know how to do it. And wrinkles are to be copied from other pictures my client provide me along with fabric pictures. Take an example as I have this fabric picture

and now I have to paste those wrinkles in it. Thanking you in advance.

Answer 1

Perhaps if you start off with a plain white shirt on a white background, an image something like this:

Then you could make that image your top layer, and set the layer blending mode to Multiply. Then you can add the colour panels under that on different layers. The background layer should be filled white.

If the shadows aren't dark enough, you could duplicate the shadow layer to intensify them.

This leads to a rather flat image. So as an enhancement, you could use Select > Colour Range to select the highlights on a copy of the shirt layer, and use that selection to add a layer mask to a plain white layer - set the blending mode of the highlights layer to Screen, and lower the opacity a bit.

Another technique might be to separate the shadows in the same way I did for highlights, making a layer mask. The results look even more realistic.

Answer 2

Wrinkles in fabric are indicated by three things - shadow, highlight, pattern distortion. Since your fabric has no pattern distortion, you merely need to indicate shadows and highlights. This can be done relatively easily by merely painting on new layers.

I would not try anything such as extracting the wrinkles from the photo. That would take far too much time and ultimately never yield excellent results.

Using the photo as a "guide" of sorts . . .

• Create a new layer above the photo, grab a brush, and paint black where the shadows in the photo fall. Set the layer blending mode to Multiply.

• Then create another new layer above the photo, and paint white where the highlights in the photo fall. Set the layer blending mode to Screen.

When these two layers are overlaid on a shape, they'll create the depth for wrinkles.

Here's a quick animation to show the technique.

Painting here was done quickly so it could be improved and the opacity of the shadows/highlights would need adjustment based upon the underlying color (for example, the highlights are a bit too prominent on the blue and red shapes).

If you really want to get into proper lighting techniques when painting these types of wrinkles, Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery is an excellent resource.

Answer 3

If you have exactly matchig pieces with new colors, you can give their color to the old wrinkled suit by making a new layer with blending mode "Color".

The result is full mess in the areas that do not fit, for example here in the collar and the neck opening.

The method can be reversed. Take only the good parts from the old image and make them to fit.

The reversed method:

• Separate the radically differenttly colored parts in the old suit to different layers. The magic wand is useless. Use quick selection tool, polygonal lasso and clipping paths. Here no paths are used => generally very coarse part separation.
• Desaturate the old suit parts
• Adjust the old suit parts individually to have 50% grey average color
• delete impossible parts from the old suit by cloning and erasing. Here the collar and neck opening areas are erased and the buttons are painted over by the cloning brush
• by the smudge tool and warping make the remaining old suit parts to fit. You can also do minimal edits to the new suit.
• give to the old suit parts blending mode = hard light.
• the canvas texture grew to impossible when the old suit body was lightened to 50% grey. The texture was hided by blurring. Remember to select the body part before blurring to prevent the spreading. The blur was the Gaussian one and the radius was only 2 pix to save the general lightness variations.
• some small parts were drawed by hand because there was nothing to copy. For example the shadow under the new collar.

The folds and wrinkles are extremely difficult to create by hand. But if you have got what it takes to see them right before doing them, you can get some substantial speed boost from Photoshop:

• create a separate layer for a group of folds and wrinkles that have the same light. Select layer style = bevel&emboss, blending mode = hard light
• paint with 50% grey
• adjust the effext parameters for right light direction and shading transition widths
• take the eraser with only few percent opacity. Brush the extras off.