Dress folds tutorial

This tutorial is for Photoshop 5.0, but works in other versions of Photoshop as well.

1. The bottom of the dress usually falls in a circle, and the circle needs to be kinda narrow for it to look good, otherwise the perspective looks odd.	2. Pick the dark colour and draw the outline of the skirt on a new layer.
3. When you do a pulled up dress like this, the amount of fabric lifted up will create a draping along the middle of the dress. The drape effect should be pretty much as long as the length between the floor and the bottom of the pulled up skirt. If you draw the draping too short the dress will look uneven.	4. Create a new layer and fill the skirt with the middle colour.
5.Make yet another new layer and fill that with the middle colour. Make sure it covers the whole skirt area and a little more. This is because if you smudge outside a colourfilled area the edges and colours get messed up.	6. Since this base is kind of slouched the movement of the body is different from a base standing straight.
7. Create another layer. Pick the dark colour and start drawing the shadows using the paintbrush tool. The waist will wrinkle where the body is bended, and the opposite side will obviously be stretched.	8. Keep in mind that the shadowing doesn't have to look perfect, you'll fix that once you start smudging.
9. Pick the lightest colour to draw the light shading, ie the highlighting, using the paintbrush tool.	10. Now onto the smudging! This is the trickiest part. I use the second smallest brush (size: 3px). It's easier to use for detailed shading such as wrinkles and creases. Blend the colours well, but it's a good idea to leave some parts less smudged where the wrinkles are more enhanced.
11. When you're done smudging you want to remove the areas around the skirt. Easiest way to do so is to mark the filled skirt layer (see step 2) with the wand tool, invert, go back to the smudged layer, and clear.	12. Et voilà.
13. It's a nice detail to change the inside of the dress to either another colour or a lighter colour. Create a new layer and cover the inside of the folds. Pick a lighter colour than the lightest you've used for the dress.	14. Now change the layer option to Screen and Opacity: 30%.
15. To spiff up the dress a bit I've added a golden stripe at the bottom and some frilly stuff at the top. Make a new layer, select the paintbrush tool, and pick a golden colour. Follow the edge of the dress and then draw some frills at the top.	16. Smooth out the stripes a bit at the ends by using the smudge tool. The ends that would "disappear" into the creases should be less visible.
17. For some shine effect dodge here and there, and some burning on the sides of the frill.	18. Make sure there are no half-transparent pixels outside the dress because they will mess up if you want to save as a transparent gif. The easies way to remove those pixels is to take the wand tool, hold Shift + Ctrl and click the dress layer and then the base layer. The whole doll should now be selected. Go to Select > Inverse. That will select everything outside the doll. Make sure you're on the layer with the gold details and go to Edit > Clear. That will remove everything around it.
19. And the dress is done. =)