Alright, so it has been a little while since my last post and I do apologize for that. But I’m back with a new tutorial for you that I think you will enjoy. I have seen this done in several different tutorials all over the web and I loved the technique so much that I just had to share it with you here. I am going to show you one way to mask hair in photoshop. I will do this using channels and blend modes.

Here is the final result of the one I did for this tutorial.

Here is my starting image of a girl.

Here is the background image I want to put her in front of.

So let’s begin…

1. First we open the image of the girl and duplicate the background layer. Then, with the duplicated layer selected, you are going to go to the channels palette. Click through the channels until you find one that has a good amount of detail but still has some separation between the background and the figure you want to mask. I chose “blue.” Now duplicate that channel.

2. Now, I’ve seen this technique done with and without this next step and it is really a judgement call on your part but I like to do it and here is why. There are going to be some parts of this that you want clean lines on and the steps that are coming later in this tutorial could distort some lines and give you a bit of a headache later on. So, with that in mind, I went to the pen tool and drew a path around the girls shoulder and up her neck. I will use this path later.

3. Now with your duplicate channel selected, go to Image>Apply Image. Set your blending to Overlay and opacity to 100%. Click OK. NOTE: you can duplicate this step if you want to increase the contrast a bit more. Try it and adjust the opacity to see the results.

5. Next, with the same channel selected, go to Image>Adjustments>Curves. Using the slider bar at the bottom of the window adjust you black and white levels until you get a nice separation between your figure and the background. Just make sure you don’t go overboard with it though. You don’t want to lose too much detail. Click Ok.

6. Now select your brush tool and get a soft edge brush. Set your foreground color to black, your blend mode to overlay and your opacity to 100%. Now start painting in the hair and other dark areas you want masked out. Next set your foreground color to white and start painting the white areas. The idea is to turn the background completely white and figure completely black. The great part about this method is that with the blend mode set to overlay, the black brush won’t effect the white/light areas and the white brush won’t effect the black/dark areas. This is was is going to give you your separation of the hair detail and the background.

7. Now, remember that path from earlier? Yes. Good. Command + Click on the path in the paths palette. This will convert it into a selection. With your foreground set to black press Option + Delete to fill it with black. Now continue your brushing of the sections to get a nice separation between your figure and the background.

8. After I went through with the white brush, I noticed that I had lost most of the detail on the side of the face. You may run into this problem and you may not, but if you do here is how I fixed it. I clicked back on the full RGB channel and took out my pen tool. Then I just did the same thing with the cheek that I did with the shoulder.

Once I had my path drawn, I clicked back on the “duplicate blue” channel, command + clicked on the path layer making it a selection, then I filled it with black.

9. Once you have a good separation between the figure and background with the detail still in the hair, you want to get your brush tool out, select a hard edge brush and set the blend mode to “normal” and start filling in the extra gaps. You should have a nice border to work from so this shouldn’t be that difficult to just paint in the blanks. You should end up with a nice silhouette.

10. Now we need to bring in our background that we want to put our subject into. With the layers palette selected and everything back in full RGB, drag and drop the background image into your workspace (if you hold shift while you drag and drop, the image will center itself).

11. Now go back to the “duplicate blue” channel and command + click the channel. This will load it as a selection.

12. Next, go back to your new background image and click the “add vector mask” button. It should look like a little white circle in a gray box at the bottom of your layers palette. Now you have your image showing through your background. But you may notice that the edges aren’t as clean as you would like.

13. With the new background layer selected and the layer mask as the active selection, go to Select>Refine Edge.

15. A dialogue box will pop up. At the bottom select the standard view (the blue one with on the far left). You will notice that it turns your figure into a selection. Press command + h to get rid of the outlined selection. Adjusting the levels is really going to be all on you and your judgement for what works with your image. Adjust the levels until you get the kind of detail and smooth look you want. Play with the levels and see what kind of effect they each have on your image. What you are doing is adjusting how the layer mask is showing the edges of your figure…or “refining” the edges.

Now one thing I noticed when I had finished was that I had lost a little detail, so I went back through the layer mask with a very fine soft edge brush and painted some of it back in and after a few touch ups to the overall image (i.e. dodge, burn, etc.), I decided that I wanted the girl to face the city and not the hill, so I flipped the background image and I was done.

Final Result:

So there you have it. A great technique for masking and figure with hair using photoshop. I encourage you to play with this and see what else you can do with the techiques used in this tutorial. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Thanks for visiting.

Jon

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Photoshop, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.