Hair

[KR1156]

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?

[Ant]

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.

[KR1156]

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.

[Ant]

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".

[Ant]

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.

[KR1156]

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.