Fixing Wrinkly Backgrounds

So I’m going to show you the very simple steps I did to take my photo of Mason from this

to this

Now, I’m not covering all the editing steps in depth, just how to clean up the background. Before I started cleaning up the background I went ahead and did all my regular editing so that my photo is now at this

First, I’m going to duplicate my image and apply a guassiaun blur to the duplicate. You want a pretty good strong blur. I used a blur radius of 30.

Next I’m going to add a layer mask and black out Mason.

Then I took a light gray brush and went around the outline of him to soften the change from blur to focus some.

After that I’m going to use my color dropper and select the primary color of my background and fill a blank layer with it.

Create a layer mask on that layer and switch the layer mask color from white to black. (Your picture should now show back up and the solid color should vanish) Take a medium gray brush and start brushing over the wrinkles.

Take the gray lighter and lighter to cover stronger shadows until you end up with a mostly smooth background.

Of course you could take it further and completely smooth out the background, but I like to leave it with some texture left to it. Also if, like me, you used a background with texture (that isn’t just wrinkles lol) on it and you want some of that to show up either hide the gaussian blur layer or play with its opacity. For example here’s my finished picture with the guassian layer at 50%

Well, I hope you enjoyed this and found it helpful.