Tutorial: Fixing discolouration – sweat on the shirt and suntanned bikini tan lines

Level: Intermediate

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One day a friend of mine in Taiwan sent me this photographs to me and crying for help. The story of this photograph starts with his sister was getting married and they had some pre wedding photos taken, my friend was one of his sister’s photographers and he got this nice shot of the happy couple. The problem was the weather was hot and humid and the groom couldn’t stop sweating. The sweat cause the discolouration on the groom’s shirt as the photo showed. My friend told me that the couple were going to have this photograph printed and framed as large as 50 inches, the stain on the shirt would look quite nasty. So he sent me this photo and ask for help.
It only took 5 minutes for me to fix this problem.

First,examining the photo to find out the problem of the discolouration. The groom is wearing a striped shirt with all the creases, so the first thing is forget about healing and clone stamp tool, they wouldn’t work well in this situation. Looking at the colour of stain and compare to the correct shirt colour surrounding it, the stain is darker and purplish, that means too much red. All we have to do is brighten it up and take off the redness.
Because it’s the “colour” differences causing the problem, so I use “color range” to select the area. It makes sense, isn’t it?

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Step 1) Select the stain area
Go to Select->Color Range, a window would pop up. Click on the stain area on the photo, you will see the area has been selected in the small window. For getting more accurate selection, you can hold on the Shift key and click a few more times to sample the stain area, especially the edges. Be careful not to add the “correct” colour of the shirt in. I set the fuzziness about 14, it depends on the image, higher number will select bigger area.
Then click o.k. You’ll see the selection on the photo.

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Step 2) Use Curve adjustment layer.
Add and new adjustment layer “Curve” to correct the colour.
In the RGB channel, pull the brightness up.
In the Red channel, bring the red down by dragging the curve down.
In the Blue channel, it’s too much blue so I drag the curve down to bring down the bluish colour.
In the Green channel, I pull a bit green in it, drag the curve slightly up.

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What I am doing in this step is actually tweet the colour tone to match the shirt colour which “surrounding by the stain”, so the stain blend in and become less noticeable.

Step 3) Grab the good old brush tool, work on the layer mask, use soft brush 0% hardness to blend the colour in. Presumably you are familiar with the layer mask method, so you know what to do. (Maybe I make a tutorial video to demonstrate this?!!)  :shawming:

Because we use colour range to select the stain area, so you can see not only the stain on the chest is corrected, also with the underarm and the sleeve.

There you are. Correcting colour just as easy as that. See the before and the after.

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Another sample of fixing discolouration, the suntanned bikini lines.
We girls all experience that when we had our new and nice triangle bikini showing off on the beach, the next day it tends to leave some lines and suntanned mark on our skin. We are girls, we like to change, play with different outfit. The next day we would change to a strapless top or a bandeau bikini, so the different colour of tan lines show as the photo I showed you below. Actually with this particular photograph, we used triangle bikini for the bikini shoot earlier on, so when we change to bandeau bikini the model had the tan lines. (The model was good and professional, she didn’t come with a suntan like that originally.)

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The method is similar to the sweat stain and there is a couple of ways doing it. Here I’ll show you what I think it’s most efficient.
Examining the discolouration problem: The colour is brighter and less saturated then the surrounding area. So what I’m going to do is darken and bring more redness to the area.

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Step 1) Use the Lasso tool to select the discolouration area and select the area slightly bigger.

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Step 2) Add a new adjustment layer “Curve”.
Bring the brightness down in the RGB channel, add a bit of redness by drag the curve up a little of the curve in the Red channel. Tweet around these two curves until the discolouration area match the correct skin tone.

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Step 3) Use the brush tool, hardness 0%, on the layer mask, blend the area in. I used 90% opacity of the brush for blending the sharp edges, then change to 10% ~ 20% opacity for blending the rest of the area.

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Step 4) Use the patch tool to even out the skin tone.

Then it’s done!

Let’s see the before and after.

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This example is slightly more tricky than the one above, it requires more blending technique. All you have to do is keep practicing then you’re get better.

Hope you learn something from this tutorial. If you have any question, please don’t hesitate to leave it in the comment.
Happy Photoshopping!!