Any of you guys who work on hair often, i applaud you. I know Theveed was mentioning not too long ago, that he had a lot of experience with it.

i've been helping out on a campaign for a major hair product, and it's by far the worst thing to work on. After all the careful cloning, i literally have to step away from the image for a few minutes, and come back with a fresh view, so i can nit pick the tiny imperfections, and kill any traces of cloning.

I've done a lot of intricate masking and stuff, but never worked on images where the hair was the selling point, and most important.

it's like a bad christmas.......just never ends.

out of curiosity, do you find yourselves cloning carefuly most of the time, or do try and cut and paste areas to look smoother?

Both. I work on hair 89.6% of the time. Remove all the noticeable cross hairs with cloning. Sometimes, depending on the end file/viewing size you can utilize cloning on darkness and lightness. Definitely pull 'good' hair and comp in over really bad areas. Oft times a rats nest is still going to be an ugly rats nest no matter how much careful cloning you do, so replace with nicer hair whenever possible.

i guess it's basically a image-by-image situation, gotta do whatever you can to make it look better, no real secret.

i try to clone the major distracting strays....but i feel cutting a patch, and if you can make it work, will look better over areas that are all messy and cloning is impossible.

Problems arise when as you start to improve the hair, the hairstyle may change and you know art directors... It's a balancing act of trying to get approval through improvement and a slight change in direction. However, if you just make it look great it's a lot easier to sell if the while doing so you keep the same "feeling".

Ask for other files to comp from. We always get 'extras' (non selects) for areas of better hair. Plus, we have compiled a "parts" section on our server for grabbing things from: eyebrows, hair, lips, eyes, lashes, etc.

i've had to rely on extra shots a lot in the past. whatever makes
it look Not-retouched.

having spare source files for parts is a great idea.