Hair Masking

[jaz]

Trying to learn to mask hair. Here's my first attempt...

http://www.jackzucker.com/Photoshop/facesofsande.jpg

Jaz

[Ed_L]

Hmmm, about time you wrote a tutorial, isn't it?

Ed

[DannyRaphael]

Very impressive, Jack...

What was the original background?

[jaz]

Originally posted by DannyRaphael
Very impressive, Jack...

What was the original background?

Here's the original picture:

http://www.jackzucker.com/Photoshop/sandebefore.jpg

[dcarr]

Give details, Jaz, that's excellent hair.
Debbie

[jaz]

Originally posted by dcarr
Give details, Jaz, that's excellent hair.
Debbie

Thanks Debbie.

The easy part was the outside of the hair against the black background. For that, I went into the RGB channels and selected the channel with the most contrast between hair and background. I copied that to an alpha channel and then used levels to make it all black and white, getting rid of the gray areas. That gave me the wispy outside portion of the hair but of course that selection covered the entire face too. I erased the inside portion of the hair and loaded the channel as a selection and then used quick mask and some of the natural brushes to do the inside portion of the hair.

After getting the selection just right, I then created a fill layer, and a layer mask and used my selection to create a mask so only the hair was being effected by the fill layer. It's still not perfect and I'm still learning but it was fun trying it.

Jaz