How do I make my hair look shiny like a shampoo ad

[Fairy]

Here is a sample of my hair from a photo.
My hair is black in fact black,and I want to make it look shiny and nice like an advert for shampoo.
How can I do this?

[HroadhogD1]

I am far from an expert, but I would think lighting would play a big part in getting a shine from your hair.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Originally Posted by HroadhogD1

I am far from an expert, but I would think lighting would play a big part in getting a shine from your hair.

Yeah the shine comes a lot from lighting, either back lighting or direct reflection from the light off the hair.... sorry not going to be a quick fix....

[Flashtones]

with a grayscale image like that you run the risk of having shine look like gray hair. You'll probably need to make selections so that only some segments are highlighted to appear like shine. While letting other areas remian quite dark. Work with layers in screen mode to lighten the hair, then add contrast with softlight, overlay, curves, etc.

[catasha13]

http://www.photoshopbuddy.net/shinehair.html

[Fairy]

Thanks catasha, this is the tutorial that I first tried, unfortunately on black hair it makes it go grey.

[seattle-light]

The first requirement is that you have an image that has enough detail information to really see the individual hairs and see some of its shiny quality (you need great detail and the ability to create tonal separation). Then it really helps to have a 16-bit image with very little noise so that as you make local adjustments to lighting and contrast (and there are lots of different ways to do that) to bring out the shine.

If you start with a JPEG (which is 8-bit) with all the hair tones being black or near black you're going to have a really hard time bringing out the shine, because the JPEG compression discards a lot of detail information in deep shadow areas because it knows it can get away with a lot under the cover of darkness.

If the detail isn't there in your original image then you're going to have to fake it either by pasting in some similar hair that has the level of detail you need and then adjusting it or creating the hair detail from scratch.

Or you can shoot the hair with bringing out the shine in mind and really shoot for the detail and tonal range. If you can get some actual shine on the hair from the lighting that would be a huge plus so that you're not having to make it up entirely in post. It's much easier to add in contrast and to darken areas than it is to create life from a black blob. You need detail to work with in order to get detail in the end.

If you shoot for the middle, then you have the flexibility to push it lighter and darker in post.

Then it's a matter of making great selections (often down to individual strand levels) and playing around with different kinds of adjustments. Sadly, there is no simple "Shiny Hair" filter in Photoshp, but I'm sure they're working on it.

Good luck with that. Hope you're doing well. Take care. Alan.

[Jerryb]

hi ,
just a novice but anyway... i liked flashtones thoughts.. your image is greyscale and it hard.... plus being subtle works best in my opinion.. especially when working up close because when you zoom out you perecieve thing a little different...

now i used that tutorial.. and the first time i did it the way they wanted with there numbers, the selection part was way to grey... so i modified thiere tutorial a little
1. when i sued the lasso is used a little feather....
2.. on the levels.. i just lighten the selection just a little to the point where you can just percieve a few strands.... if i lighten anyfurther everyting way to grey down the line...
3.. they called for using linear dodge ... but that was still a little to bright and grey so i tried other blends and the lighten blend gave the subtle effect i was looking for....

that how i did it... godd or bad .. smiling.. but it worked for me

Originally Posted by Fairy

Thanks catasha, this is the tutorial that I first tried, unfortunately on black hair it makes it go grey.