Doing A Hair Selection With Ease
Posted on 9:15 PM by Daniy
One day, you’ve been asked with my friend to take his photograph. He needs to submit his photo for the mid-exam so you should extract the result and place it into the new background. The process sounds easy but unfortunately it was not, since he has a jagged and wispy hair that is hard to select with your Photoshop.
But there’s always a technique to do the job. You can manually select the image area, but before you do that, you better separate the image between the head and the body. Since hair selection is the hardest part, you can easily select the body part and left the head for the main task. By separating the head, it also means that you are working on less area which requires less resource from your machine.
After separating the head section and put it on a new separated layer, you can start using the help of channel palette. I usually work within the RGB color mode and choose the green channel since it contains the contrast value of an image. The shortcut to load from channel is by holding the Ctrl [Mac: Command] key and clicking on the corresponding channel. You should have a more detailed hair selection by now and erase the outer part of your selection.
Using the Layer Blending modes is the next step to enhance your selection quality. You can have those blending modes right at the top of your layer palette. I usually choose the screen mode to do the work and the image will automatically blended with the new background. But if try to experiment with another mode, maybe you’ll find a more interesting result.
The last key is defringing your selection to wipe those white pixels around your selection. I think you have a better result for your hair selection right now.
By the way, you can also have experiment with any software instead of Adobe Photoshop, like Fluid Mask 3. It’s the professional’s choice for masking jobs, and could run both as a standalone application and a plu-in to Adobe Photoshop. While asking about how it works, why don’t you try it yourself by downloading it’s free trial. It’s free, at least for 14 days.
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But there’s always a technique to do the job. You can manually select the image area, but before you do that, you better separate the image between the head and the body. Since hair selection is the hardest part, you can easily select the body part and left the head for the main task. By separating the head, it also means that you are working on less area which requires less resource from your machine.
After separating the head section and put it on a new separated layer, you can start using the help of channel palette. I usually work within the RGB color mode and choose the green channel since it contains the contrast value of an image. The shortcut to load from channel is by holding the Ctrl [Mac: Command] key and clicking on the corresponding channel. You should have a more detailed hair selection by now and erase the outer part of your selection.
Using the Layer Blending modes is the next step to enhance your selection quality. You can have those blending modes right at the top of your layer palette. I usually choose the screen mode to do the work and the image will automatically blended with the new background. But if try to experiment with another mode, maybe you’ll find a more interesting result.
The last key is defringing your selection to wipe those white pixels around your selection. I think you have a better result for your hair selection right now.
By the way, you can also have experiment with any software instead of Adobe Photoshop, like Fluid Mask 3. It’s the professional’s choice for masking jobs, and could run both as a standalone application and a plu-in to Adobe Photoshop. While asking about how it works, why don’t you try it yourself by downloading it’s free trial. It’s free, at least for 14 days.
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