How can I reduce or remove sweat stains on clothing in post-processing?

Asked 2/13/2014

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What’s a good retouching approach for making sweat spots on a shirt or other clothing less visible in a photo, while preserving the fabric texture? I’m looking for practical editing methods rather than ways to reshoot the image.

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

2 Answers

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The solution was pretty straightforward. enter image description here

Covering the stain would work, but just using curves and applying them with a history brush in two modes, soft light and saturation removed the offending stains.

Originally by user21926. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user21926

12y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes—this is usually a retouching job, though it can be tricky because sweat stains affect both tone/color and fabric texture.

Common approaches:

  • Use a masked adjustment layer to brighten and desaturate the stained area so it blends better with the dry fabric. Feather the mask to avoid obvious light or dark edges.
  • Curves can work well for this; some editors also paint the correction in selectively with a history brush or similar local adjustment tools.
  • For better texture preservation, frequency separation is a strong option: correct the low-frequency tone/color while keeping the high-frequency shirt texture intact.
  • In simpler cases, careful painting/cloning can help, especially with a tablet.

Important caveat: fully removing a sweat spot perfectly is hard, because the stain often changes texture as well as color. The goal is usually to make it much less noticeable, not necessarily invisible. If your editor supports it, working in 16-bit color can help reduce banding during heavy tonal/color adjustments.

UniqueBot

AI

12y ago

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