Lengthen a dress in Photoshop

TB
Posted By
Teresa_Brown
Nov 2, 2003
Views
689
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I need to lengthen a dress in a photograph. WHat is the easiest way to do this? HELP Treza

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YrbkMgr
Nov 2, 2003
One is the clone stamp – probably your best bet. You might also try making a selection of the bottom portion of the dress and then copy/paste it to a new layer, then you can distort it a bit. Whether or not that works depends on the image compositon, the intent and the length you have to bring it to. All in all, the clone stamp is probably the easiest and most controllable.
DP
Daryl Pritchard
Nov 2, 2003
Hi Teresa,

If you are using Photoshop 7.0, then a combination of using the Clone tool (Rubber Stamp) and the Healing Brush, perhaps even the Patch tool, should get you going in the right direction. Here’s the jist of what I’d do:

1. Select the lower part of the dress and area below to which you’ll be lengthening it. Copy that to a new layer.

2. Hopefully the dress hangs relatively straight, and doesn’t have a great deal of patterns or folds in it to complicate things…Working in the new layer, clone the bottom edge of the dress to where you think the "new" bottom edge should be. If the dress flares down and out, then clone additional areas of the dress to broaden the bottom to what seems right.

3. For the area between the new bottom edge and the original edge, use the clone tool to fill in that area as best you can. If there are not patterns in the dress that will greatly simplify the task. If there are folds creating shadows, try to clone vertically downward so as to try and maintain the folds and shadows as accurately as you can. Cloning without creating too much of a herringbone pattern will require some finessing of the brush sizes and feathering, as well as varying your cloning source.

4. Once you’ve achieved a good result with the clone tool, you now have color, lighting, and texture data that work better with the Healing tool’s blending capabilities. Whereever you see any sense of that herringbone from the clone tool or other rough areas that didn’t clone too cleanly, go over them with the healing tool to try and smooth everything out.

5. As you go through all this process, you may want to use the Marquee tools to select areas where you are cloning/healing to, so the tools don’t paint beyond the marquee boundary.

6. If you make any mistakes along the way that you have difficulty correcting, take advantage of all your work being on a new layer and return to the background layer to copy more of the source data to another layer and merge that with the layer you were previously working with.

Time and patience should yield some pretty good results if the dress isn’t too complex to work with. I realize that what I’ve stated here is very much an overview, but hopefully you get the idea.

Good luck,

Daryl
TB
Teresa_Brown
Nov 2, 2003
Daryle – thank you so much! I so appreciate the information. T
DP
Daryl Pritchard
Nov 3, 2003
Teresa,

I’m glad to help…I hope the concepts I’ve provided do give you some successful results.

Regards,

Daryl
DP
Daryl Pritchard
Nov 3, 2003
Teresa,

While I’ve not asked your permission yet, I’m posting a link to my edited version of your dress image, so as to solicit other opinions. If you want me to remove the image for any reason, please let me know. Not knowing if the woman in the dress is a model, friend, etc., I’ve cropped her head out of the photo to avoid model release problems.

All,

The photo found at <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/extended_skirt.jpg> is a low resolution version of Teresa’s file, showing the image before and after my attempts to lengthen the skirt. The unposted hi-res image reveals the rather poor quality results of my efforts which are seen here primarily as seams between the layers which provided the skirt extensions. Because of the pattern in the dress and the slight curves caused by how the material drapes, use of the clone tool seemed to NOT be the best approach to take. Instead, I copied and shifted selected areas of the dress, attempting to align them so as get the best appearance of the layer seams that I could. I couldn’t really determine a good way to blend out the seams, and that is the crux of my question here:

For such patterns as this does anyone know what the most effective approach would be to lengthen the dress while minimizing apparent seams between the layers? The only other thought I’ve had is that rather than use rectangular selections as I did, an irregular selection across the width of the skirt might’ve been better. That is, using the polygon lasso or pen tool, one could create a selection boundary that traces "between the lines" of the pattern while following any curvature caused by the drape of the dress, and that spans no more than one or two rows of the pattern. Much more than that, and I suspect it would remain pretty difficult to copy, shift, and align the selection. Because this would be a much narrower strip across the dress than the large retangular sections that I used, quite a number of layers would be needed to build up a very long extension. I’m not sure how well this would work, but it’s the only other idea that comes to mind.

Any insights into how to tackle such a task are appreciated.

Daryl
BL
Bill_Lamp
Nov 5, 2003
I’m not at my house with Photoshop available, but I wonder if vertical selections would work better. Another possibility is using the healing brush (PS-7) on the "joints".

Bill
DP
Daryl Pritchard
Nov 5, 2003
Hi Bill,

Thanks for your comment. While vertical selections might work, I’m not sure I’d have been able to do as good a job with them myself. But, practice makes perfect and although it still isn’t perfect and Teresa was pleased with my 1st effort, my 2nd attempt did indeed turn out better. I used the approach mentioned in my prior post, using a narrower horizontal slice to build the extension. Just as you mentioned, I then used the healing brush to smooth the edge between two overlapped copies of that slice. That pair of healed and merged slices was then duplicated, shifted, and aligned for the best appearance, and then flattened, then the process repeated once again. In effect, that meant 8 slices were used. Now, where I "cheated" in the interest of time, was that I didn’t repeatedly heal each new layer that was duplicated. So some roughness in the pattern is still obvious (more so in hi-res version than what I have on the web) but overall much improved: <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/skirt_extend2.jpg>

Thanks,

Daryl
J
jeffreyjburke
Nov 5, 2003
RE: <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/skirt_extend2.jpg>

It would probably look better if you put the shadows on the legs and along the front of the skirt where it touches the front part of the leg. Without this it makes it difficult to look at without seeing something being off.

After duplicating such a large and blatant area, I usually look for repeated areas, and change the repeated area to blend it more. I do also realize you probably did this fairly quickly, and spending more time would produce much better results.
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 5, 2003
Daryl,

You could select portions of the dress, paste to new layers as often as necessary, and then temporarily change the opacity of the layers so that you can overlay them accurately on the existing seams. Then change the opacity back to 100 percent and flatten. You might have to experiment with blending modes on the layer a little to make it look right.

Jake

EDIT: I just saw your 2nd attempt. It looks pretty darn good.

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