Reshaping hair with minimal distortion - ?

[JR22]

A question I put to you pros,

I'm doing a job on a hair shoot. It's a funny one though, because it's full body shots. A very stylised concept.

Anyway,

I've received mark ups from the hair stylist, who has liquified the hair how she wants it to be. Fine with me, and she did a decent job.

However, in some shots she's pushed out, up and around a fair bit - when replicating her shapes, as I predicted, the liquefy starts to mush the pixels. I can help it a little with smart sharpen but it's less than ideal.

Would anyone know a better way to shape hair, aside from cutting the hair into portions and warping each one, then cleaning up the joins etc (would rather avoid this)...

Cheers!

[JR22]

Re: Reshaping hair with minimal distortion - ?

No takers?

[Flashtones]

Re: Reshaping hair with minimal distortion - ?

You've basically covered the bases yourself.

Get things as far as you can via cut/copy/paste/transform etc, then warp/liquify as little as necessary because of image degradation. Sometimes you have to bring in hair sections from another image, and sometimes you have to hand draw in some strands to blend.

[skoobey]

Re: Reshaping hair with minimal distortion - ?

I would say use warp, it's more gentle.

I don't use liquify at all, I prefer copying and warping section by section, then checking with difference blending mode where it isn't meeting up.

That's pretty much it.

I'm quite bad with puppet warp, and it sort-of over sharpens both the edges of selection, and "the joints".

[JR22]

Re: Reshaping hair with minimal distortion - ?

Ahhh - good tips. Thanks guys. I'll keep those in mind. Might have to resort to this. Yes, puppet warp is a funny thing.