Hat woman

[Britsdad]

Hiya guys,

I've got a real problem and I hope someone can give me a hand.

The photo below has been brought to me to restore and place on a new yellowish background, and the finished picture is to be printed on canvas 400mm x 300mm. As you can see has a very soft "feel" to it and I'm having a nightmare trying to select the hair, see my attempt after 4 or 5 masks made with the red channel. The only thing I can think of doing now is finding some similar hair from a more distinct model and transforming it into place.

My question is, can anyone point me to a photo that I can use to "borrow" hair from?

[TommyO]

Britsdad,
While I can't point you to hair, I would consider working more on the mask. The resulting image you show indicates a better mask could be helpful. I did a quick look and would agree working with the red channel is good. Yet, I did a quick mask and got pretty good results. I've attached my quick version just for you to compare. Mine could certainly be better, but in a few minutes, this is what I got. Keep in mind too that it will appear somewhat degraded from getting to our 200K file size limit. See what you think.

[chillin]

Try to create a mask by removing black.

[Britsdad]

Thanks Tommy,
Yea that's basically what I got with my red channel, but when I selected it and jumped it to it's own layer I ended up too much of the background included.

Chillin,
I wonder why I didn't think of that, doh! seemed to work a lot better burning away the background first then dodgeing the hair :-)

Anyway, this is what I'm going with, I've just smudged any of the unwanted background away and ended up with this.

Thanks for the help.

John

[chillin]

Originally Posted by Britsdad

....
Anyway, this is what I'm going with, I've just smudged any of the unwanted background away and ended up with this.

I didn't use "smudging", I don't think you have to.

[Britsdad]

Magic Chillin,
But I don't get your layers, how did you create your mask? with channels? What are the layer masks? (sorry for my stupidity)

John

[chillin]

Look at the link here.

[Britsdad]

Cheers Chillin,
However I've downloaded both black and white remove, unzipped them, copied them into "plugins" 8bf files but when I start up photoshop it throws up an error saying MSVCRT10.dll was not found.

Any ideas?

John

[unimatrix001]

not sure if you are on a mac or a windows machine.
for windows go here to download the msvcrt10.dll and place it in the folder where your photoshop.exe file is. Not in your system32 folder it could cause other programs to mess up and not run correctly
http://www.dizteq.com/joestuff/freestuff.html
not sure if it will work for a mac ... i searched and all files went back to this windows download... Good luck.

[Britsdad]

Got it to work now, I'm on windows pc by the way, and thank's Uni, but I can't get the results Chillin got :-(

Chillin can you talk me thru' your flow? I don't seem to be able to get the way you've got your layers.

John

[chillin]

Originally Posted by Britsdad

Chillin can you talk me thru' your flow?

John

I sent you a link to the original file, I hope that it will help you.

[Britsdad]

Thanks Chillin,

Replied to your PM

John

[Daviskw]

Maybe a little more texture in the background to help soften the transitions.

Butch

[Britsdad]

My thanks to all, in particular Chillin,

Butch, I like the idea of adding a little texture, it has blended the background in more, but it is going to be printed on canvas so the texture is there anyway, did you use the same method to select her hair as Chillin? what ever I did I was left with loads of crap all around her hair until I used the "elimblack" plugin, even then it was pure stubborn pig headedness that made me not give up until I got it "almost as good as Chillin"

Anyway here's my final effort, my stubborn streak has now been well and truly beaten out of me :-)

Regards to all....John

Edit,
Just noticed the lighter patch in her hair by her right ear, honest it doesn't show on the full size image :-) which is 638mb!

[Daviskw]

I think you did an excellent job. I just used the red channel but below is a touch up just drawing a few hairs to fill things out... Another option.

Butch

[Britsdad]

You are obviously a much better artist than I, when I painted hair in it looked like worms sticking out of her head ;-)

John