I'm pulling out my hair trying to cut around hair

[winwintoo]

I've been trying to do the "cutting around hair" tutorial that I found here:

http://www.esbr08044.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/hair.html

and everything goes fine until I get to the section:

"Load the earlier selection using command option 5 and carefully paint back the hair in the selection using white as the foreground colour, a quick way of doing this is to press D on the keyboard to go to the default B/W swatch and X to swap the foreground and backgroud swatch around."

When I use a paint brush to try and color in the rest of the hair, nothing happens. In desperation, I grabbed the paint bucket and voila - the hair filled in.

What am I doing wrong. Can you ONLY use the paint bucket in this instance, or did I have some settings wrong on the paintbrush.

Thanks,
Margaret

[Mig]

Hi WinWin,


The explanation is a little funky, but it's a great tutorial - thanks for the link.
Prior to the section that you're having trouble with it says to add a layer mask. This cuts out the part of the hair where you had made a selection using the pen tool - essentially the pen tool had made a selection that cut out solid stuff, so you didn't need to be precise.
The alpha channel that you had created earlier is what will help you grab all the wisps of hair. When you activate this alpha channel into a selection you can then go to the layer with the layer mask and, while painting with white as the default colour, you can paint part of this layer back in, which in this case would be the wisps of hair. (To do this though you have to make sure you're painting on the layer mask and not the actual layer. You shouldn't see the airbrush icon beside this layer in the layers pallette, but instead see a little icon with a round hole in it - that's the layer mask.)
Incidentally, you can totally omit all of this confusion and remove one step by refining the alpha channel. Do this by painting on the alpha channel with black at 100% to plug all the holes that are not solid black, but just be careful not to mess with the outside wisps of hair. Once you're done doing that you can go to the layer with the girl, activate the selection from the alpha channel, add the layer mask and you're done.

Mig

[winwintoo]

Thanks for the reply Mig, but it still doesn't work for me. When I follow the instructions and use the paintbrush, nothing happens, yet when I use the paintbucket it does.

What is the difference between the paintbrush and the paint bucket in this instance???

Are you able to follow the instructions and use the paintbrush?? I'm wondering if there are some settings wrong or something.

Thanks,
Margaret