Hello all,

I'm new here. It seems like a great forum! :)

I was wondering if anyone knew a way to colourize brown/brunette hair to blonde. I've tried several ways, but I can never seem to get it.

Has anyone ever done this? If so, could you explain a bit?

Thanks! I'm going to check out the rest of the forums.

-Liv

Hi Liv, and welcome to RetouchPro!

As with most things Photoshop, there are a number of ways of doing it.

Did you have a particular image in mind? If you post it, various ones will likely give it a go and explained how they did it, and you can decide which way you like best.

Victoria

I have been working on this image for a challenge at a site. But I have tried it in the past, so I've been curious for a while.

Ooooh, that's not something I've tried before, particularly on such dark hair. For light hair, you'd expect to see more detail, but there isn't a lot of detail in the black.

I treated it differently for black and white than I would for colour, concentrating on lightening, but obviously not having to worry about adding any colour to it. I've only spent about 2 mins on it, and I'm not quite happy. I'll continue thinking...

In the meantime, what I tried was using one of the channels to create a mask, and applied a levels adjustment so that mainly the hair was selected, and tidied it up with a quick brush over. I used that mask to create a curves layer, lightening the shadows to about 128, and going from there sharply increasing contrast, with it leveling off about midway. I painted the mask back over the eyes slightly too, as they looked too dark, although I think they need a bit more.

I'm interested to see what anyone else comes up with!

Welcome aboard Liv. This is an extremely rough mask that I used. What I did was to duplicate a channel (they're all the same), make a curves adjustment on it to greatly increase the contrast. Inverted the image (mask only). This gave me the white hair I was looking for. Then I painted everything that was not hair with black. Select all, copy, then paste into it's own layer. From there, it was a matter of using a layer mask to take it closer to what I wanted (keep the white hair, but hide everything else). I selected the background, and made it a little darker to contrast with the hair. The mask could be a lot better, but this was done in a hurry. Hope this gets you a starting point for making it a lot better.

Ed

Like the others I created a mask for the hair using a copy of the red channel, duplicated the layer with the selection active added heavy noise to the hair then smudged the noise using a 'hair brush' some in lighten mode some normal. Dodged a bit to further lighten.

Christine

Christine - that's really good - I couldn't think how to create texture in the hair, but that's a good way of doing it!

Christine, is there a way of getting the hair brush? Great work by the way!

Dave

Excellent work Christine! How 'bout a tutorial? :)

Ed

Thanks Victoria, Dave and Ed,

The hair brush is one of Trimoons but is basically 6 or 7 small dots randomly spaced. Not sure if it is available for free on his site as I purchased one of the CD's.

Ed - I'll think about a tut but the day job is keeping me very busy up til Christmas.

Christine

That looks very nice, Christine!

Thanks everyone, for giving this a try. I think I'll play around a bit more with it and see how I do. Next thing would be trying it out in colour! ;)

That looks very nice, Christine!

Thanks everyone, for giving this a try. I think I'll play around a bit more with it and see how I do. Next thing would be trying it out in colour! ;)
Looks OK to me!
byRo.

Looks OK to me!
byRo.

Awesome job, there! I can never get skin to look right. >.< That's VERY good. I can see I need quite a bit of practice!

Ah, but when I said 'trying out in colour' I more so meant trying to turn a brown to blonde in a colour pic. :P