Selecting Hair in Photoshop

A common task in glamour & fashion retouching is selecting a person’s hair to change its color, move the person to another image, etc.  While Photoshop offers some fairly powerful selection tools (i.e. pen tool, lasso, magic wand, etc), they often are not precise nor accurate enough to select fine strands of hair on a person’s head, coat, or an animal’s fur.  For tasks such as that (besides using an advanced selection plug-in), you’ll need to use some more advanced techniques in Photoshop such as:

• Creating masks from the channels in your image
• Employing levels adjustments to help create contrast between the hair and background
• Working with the Refine Edge tool to reduce artifacts in your selection
• Use LAB color to assist in selecting hair against complex backgrounds
• Selecting hair & people with the Extract tool

There are nearly an hour’s worth of video tutorials below that are geared towards CS3 & CS4.  What are you waiting for?  Learn how to select hair in Photoshop!

Photoshop CS3 Tutorial: Advanced Selecting Hair

This is probably the best hair selection tutorial for Photoshop I’ve seen.  It’s nearly thirty minutes long, and details all the tools & techniques you’ll need to be familiar with to make advanced hair selections with two examples.  In the first example, he takes a woman in a black dress shot on a fairly high-key white background, and demonstrates the “easy way” to select her & her hair so that he can insert them to another another picture.  In the second example, a Maxim-style shot of a blonde woman in a leopard bikini against a complex, jungle-like background, he cuts her out and puts her on a beach.  Since the background is much more difficult to work with, he uses some advanced tricks to select her and her hair.  Once each model is inserted into a new background, the author shows how to clean up any artifacts & oddities that may result from even the best selections (by refining the selection and burning the highlights).

Photoshop Tutorial – How to Cut Out Hair

This video demonstrates a quick & dirty way (read “probably not good enough for professional applications, but works well-enough for most people”) to select hair in Photoshop.  He uses an image of a man in a jacket with a furry hood, and places him on a blue background from a white one.  The basic technique uses blending overlay options to along with multiple layers to achieve the effect.  As with the first video, he burns the highlights around the edges of the fur to remove any traces of a halos or artifacts that may result.  Also, it’s only three minutes long, so if you’re in a hurry, this tutorial would be good to watch.

Cool Photoshop – Hair Selection

In this video, the author creates a website header image, and needs to select the models hair to transform it a bit to fit on the site.  He uses a levels adjustment on a copy of a channel he creates to make the selection of her and her hair, then paints black all over her to clean the selection up.  From there, he flips the image, uses the free transform tool to stretch her hair out to one side (pretty nifty technique), and applies a clean gradient as the background.  Plus, he’s got a cool Australian/New Zealand accent

Photoshop – Select and Change Hair Color

This video demonstrates a safe, conservative way to select hair using the dodge & burn tools (instead of a levels adjustment) to select hair in Photoshop.  After masking off the majority of the girl’s hair, the author performs some minor cleanup work with the eraser, then shows a couple different ways to change her hair color: via the Hue/Saturation adjustment, as well as with a color overlay on the new layer.  Each method is effective, so you’ll have to experiment a bit to find which one works for you.  There is no narration in the video, but it moves at a nice slow pace, and includes many comments overlayed on the screen.  Plus, there’s some symphonic music that sounds like it came from a Final Fantasy video game playing throughout the first part of the video.

Photoshop – Extract and Hair Tutorial

Yet another method to select hair in Photoshop is by using the Extract tool.  It’s quite easy to select a person and his/her hair with the tool, but it tends to leave quite a few rough, unnatural edges, along with some artifacts.  The author of the video does a great job of showing how to smooth out the edges of the selection, and add “hair” back in with some clever brush strokes.  He also stresses that this technique is much easier when you use a Wacom drawing tablet, but it’s not absolutely necessary.

Extract Tool on Photoshop

The final video uses a combination of the pen tool and extract tool along with a couple layers to extract a woman shot in a studio to a photograph of a landscape.  It’s another fairly quick & dirty method for selecting hair & people, but works fairly well.  Whenever you use the extract tool (as noted in this video), you’ll very likely have some rough edges to clear up with other tools such as the eraser, clone stamp, or the burn & dodge tools.

After watching these Photoshop tutorials and practicing the advanced selection techniques within, you should become a master at selecting hair in no time!  As always, if you found them helpful, please leave a comment here or on the author’s YouTube channels.