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Originally Posted by Atom
Juggo, how do you do hair? Do you use a certain prog or have a certain technique?
I was messing around with the hair on Ricoool's pic last night and I tried using a PS plug-in but I haven't figured out how to really make it look natural.
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well... it really depends on what you are trying to do as to how much time and effort is needed. One of the problems with working with this photo is that there a shadow of every hair on the wall... which in turn makes it even more fuzzy to start with.
However, there are a few ways to go about it. (like I said depending on what your end result needs to be for.)
If you are cleaning it up for printing, ie. photo retouching. You can use a nice little feature built into photoshop CS. If you hold your mouse down on the Healing Brush Tool in the tool pallete, you will see a tool called the Patch Tool become selectable. You use this to draw areas around the wisps of hair and then drag from inside the selection out to an area of the background. This is a trick I learned from a professional photographer friend of mine. This is still a tricky thing to use, but with a little practice with the settings and making selections you can make them just dissapear pretty smoothly.
If you are working on changing the background behind the person and need the image to remain large (ie, showing any mistakes) you will have to be very careful in selecting around the hairs and then adding a feather to the selection. I would do all my selecting before doing any removing. And as I always said in the past... just masks, not the delete key... or the eraser tool. That way you can tweek it even more after the fact. However... this process will be slow going. You just have to commit to it. and do it right 100%. Not trying to be rude in any way, but to do such a great job on the skin and then spend so little time on the hair takes away from the overall quality in the work... there is a huge difference in 98% and 100% when it comes to graphics. Even more so when you are placing those images in front of peers. I think with more time this image could be taken to that next level. Time and patients are the best teachers, hate doing something?... do it until you don't mind it so much. Or leave the background the same to keep the hair in tact.
The next of the methods most used is the magic wand tool. This comes in handy, say if I was going to reduce the size of the image down to a banner or header image. Small flaws wont show as badly and it helps when you are in a crunch for time. Truth is, shrinking any image will help hide mistakes. Work on and image at 1000 pixels wide at 300 dpi then when done shrink it to 350 pixels wide at 72 dpi and you will be amazed at the level the quality goes up overall.
The last one I can think of as used often is the color select feature. Go to Select > Color Range. Then use the eye dropper to select the background color... use the Fuzzines slide bar to adjust how tight to the hair that you want to be and then mask that area out. You can do this over and over to get it exactly as tight as you want for your needs. However... this will require removing some selections of the same color before applying the mask and still adding at least a little feathering.
It all depends on the project and how creative you can get with the tools. I have to use all of those on one image at times...
Hope that helps.
- Brian