Digital Diversity

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In this third instalment of my Portrait re-touching Photoshop tutorials I will be talking about altering the hair. Hair is a big part of some ones over all look and simply changing the colour can give big impact to your photographs.

This tutorial will cover 2 areas. The first is removing stray hairs from around the head and face. The second is changing the colour.

For this tutorial I recommend you have an understanding of the following. Each subject is linked to the appropriate Photoshop tutorial
• Layers and Masks
• Adjustment layers
• Hue / Saturation adjustment layers
• Cloning and healing

The Image used in this tutorial is taken from the website www.sxc.hu. Its a stock site that has many free to download images. The image used for this tutorial can be found here.

Once you have downloaded the image or found your own to use, open it up in Photoshop.

First step is to tidy up the hair by removing any strays. Add a new blank layer to your layer stack above your main image.

Zoom in to the areas with stray hairs so you can see them clearly.

Now using a combination of the clone stamp and healing tools, carefully remove the hairs. Make sure the brush options for the tools are set to a fairly soft setting (low % hardness) so the cloned areas blend nicely with the image. Sample areas from the yellow background to clone from as close to the hairs as possible.

After you are done there should be no more stray hairs visible. You may also wish to remove some small hairs from the face area. For example, in this image there are some stray eye brow hairs that could do with being plucked.

Using your clone stamp tool again, you can remove these in the same way as the stray hairs around the head.

Get the hair to how you want it to look. If you want to be really militant about it you can get rid of every stray hair possible with this same technique. You can even tidy up the hair by cloning over bits that look out of place. For the purpose of this tutorial I will leave it at what has already been done.

The next step is to colour the hair. The first step in this process is to add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue / Saturation). Once the adjustment layer has been added look at the Hue / Saturation adjustment window. To start  getting a blond look tick the Colorize tick box, set the Hue to 49 and the Saturation to 29. This will only give you a rough colour but that will be fixed later. Before you perfect the colour you need to use the adjustment layers mask to make it only effect the hair.

On the mask make all the areas with the hair you want to alter white and the areas you don’t want affected black. Certain parts you will need to use different opacity’s so that a blend from hair to skin can be achieved without looking to false.

On the image below you can see the mask I created. To view a mask in this way simply hold down alt and click on it. You can see that at the top and bottom right I have used a lot of transparent blacks. This is because in these areas both hair and skin are showing. I Used a combination of 20% and 40% opacity brush strokes till I got the look I needed. the transparency helps blend the adjustment layer and the image layer. Masks are totally non destructive so don’t be afraid to experiment, you can always correct it later if it goes wrong.

Once your done you should have something like the image below.

The next step to getting closer to the colour needed is to add a Levels Adjustment layer (Layer <New adjustment layer > Levels). This needs to be linked to the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer by holding Ctrl and clicking between the 2 layers. The Levels adjustment layer will indent like in the image below. This means it will only effect the adjustment layer and leave the main image unaffected.

The only change you need to make here are to move the shadows slider in to 8 and the highlights slider to 223. This just gives the colour a bit more contrast. You can also go into each individual channel on the drop down menu to tweak the colour. For this case that wasn’t needed.

The last steps to getting the blond look  are to alter the Hue/Saturation adjustment layers blend mode and its opacity. Try out different blend modes as they all give different looks. I found screen worked the best in this instance with an opacity of 93%.

The hair colour was now successfully altered from dark reddish brown to blond.

You can now go back and alter the Hue , Saturation, lightness, levels, blend modes and opacity to get practically any hair colour you want. None of the settings are perminent so don’t be afraid to play around and see what you can get.

Here she is in a light red.

And here with a slightly more out there colour – purple.

Also remember that if your get to the end and you want to adjust your mask because it doesn’t look quite right, you can do at any time needed.

Tags: adjustment layers, advanced editing, advanced masks, colour correction, colour pop, colours, contrast, elements, hair, highlights, hue, layers, levels, lighting, masking, masks, photo editing, photography, photoshop, portrait, re touching, saturation, thoughts, tutorial, tutorials

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 11:20 and is filed under photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.