Hi, welcome back to the Photoshop Training Channel.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you my method for changing hair color in Photoshop.
It's actually a simple technique that I think you'll enjoy.
If you want to follow along with me, then check out the description for the tutorial image link.
And why don't we jump right into the tutorial?
It's a very simple one.
So this is the document that I'm going to work with.
And the reason that I chose this image is because it's not a perfect photo.
It does have a lot of flyaway hairs, as you can see.
And those are going to be very difficult to select,
so my suggestion for you is to create a new layer and then go into the spot healing brush tool.
Make sure that sample all layers is checked and then paint away these tiny flyaway hairs.
They're going to be really difficult to select,
so you might as well just remove them.
You can also click on the clone stamp tool.
Hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and click to set a sample source and you can paint
those pixels onto another area.
Like so.
And I would use either of these methods to remove the flyaway hairs.
Nobody's going to be able to tell that they were there to begin with.
And if you want to, you can later paint them back in by hand,
and that will look much more realistic than trying to select these fine hairs.
But anyway, these are all the flyaway hairs that I'm going to remove,
but in your image, feel free to remove as many as you want.
Next, I'm going to select both layers by holding Shift and clicking on both.
Then I'll right click and convert it into a smart object so that I'm working with basically one image.
But if I want to edit the flyaway hairs, I can always double click on the smart object
to open it up in a new tab.
A smart object is simply a container that allows you to apply
adjustments, distortions, filters, and transformations non-destructively,
which means you can always come back and edit it.
But anyway,
so now that we have our model layer,
what I'm going to do now is focus on making a selection around her hair.
And that's going to be probably the most difficult part of this entire process.
I'll select the quick selection tool and click and drag to select her hair.
Like so.
And I'm not being precise at all.
I'm going to fine-tune it a little later on in the select and mask workspace.
To subtract from your selection, you can hold
Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and
Click-and-drag over her face or any other area that doesn't need to be selected.
And when you have a good enough selection like this one,
what you need to do is click on the select and mask button to bring up the select and
mask workspace.
I'm working with the on white view,
and what I'm going to do is click on the refine edge tool and simply click and drag around
the edges, like so,
to let Photoshop make a selection around those difficult-to-select hairs.
And it's not going to be perfect and that's okay,
we're going to fine-tune it and try to make it look as realistic as possible.
And by the way, if you don't know what the refine edge tool is doing, then no worries.
I'll place a link in the description to my selected mass crash course,
where I talk about this entire panel and what all the tools and sliders do.
What I'm going to do now is select the brush tool.
And I can add to my selection if this plus icon is selected.
So I'm going to click and drag and paint over to the areas that should be selected.
So if I accidentally deselected something that shouldn't be selected, I'm just going
to paint it back in.
And I can use the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce my brush size and just
paint in these areas that should be selected.
Like so.
Then I'm going to click on this minus icon and paint on these areas that should be deselected.
I'm now going to tap on the right bracket key to increase my brush size
and I'll continue painting away these areas that shouldn't be selected.
And I'm using the bracket keys to just increase and decrease my brush size accordingly.
What I'll do now is pause the video for just a second and continue fine-tuning the selection,
and I'll be right back.
Okay, these are my results.
Next, I'm going to output this as a selection.
So I'm going to scroll down and make sure that selection is active on their output.
I don't want a mask, I want a selection.
So make sure that selection is selected under the output dropdown and press OK, and Photoshop
will apply the adjustments to the selection.
And what I'm going to do now is create a group and apply the layer mask to that group.
The reason that I'm adding the layer mask to the group is so that one layer mask can
control multiple adjustment layers.
So I'm just going to call this group hair color.
It's always a good idea to name your layers and groups.
And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to show you why I don't like to use the human
saturation adjustment layer.
I know that a lot of tutorials tell you to use the human saturation adjustment layer,
but let me tell you why I don't think that's the best tool to use.
And it has a lot to do with how difficult hair is to select.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'm going to zoom into my image here.
And obviously, I didn't do that good of a job in selecting all these little fine hairs.
So with the human saturation adjustment layer, I can drag on the hue slider to shift the
hue of the selected pixels.
But notice how the hue adjustment is also affecting the shirt and it's creating an unrealistic
look.
So for example, if I wanted purple hair color and I adjust the hue and the other properties
to get it looking the way that I want, it also shifts the colors in the shirt.
So it makes a green and that doesn't look very good.
So this is why I don't like using this adjustment layer.
Also, you can click on colorize and then adjust the color of the image.
And all of that looks much better and we don't have the shirt problem.
I don't think that the colors in the hair look realistic if we just have one single
hue like that.
That doesn't look that realistic to me.
And also with this adjustment layer, it's hard to control the brightness of the image.
And for those reasons, I don't like using just that adjustment layer.
I do like using it in combination with other adjustment layers.
And that's the method that I'm going to show you today.
So for now, I'll delete this adjustment layer because we don't need it.
And inside of that group, what I'm going to do is create a selective color adjustment
layer.
From the dropdown, make sure that you select neutrals.
And what you can do with this adjustment layer is add or subtract colors to other colors
and tones.
And I know that sounds weird, but let me show you how this works.
We have a cyan slider, a magenta slider, and a yellow slider.
And we can add or subtract the color on the slider to the color that we selected.
And basically, if we drag the slider to the right, we add the color that the label is
showing us to the color that we selected.
In this case, I'm adding cyan to the neutrals.
If we drag to the left, we subtract from the color listed on the slider and we get the
opposite color.
In the case of cyan, we get red.
And the opposite of magenta is green.
And the opposite of yellow is blue.
If you can't remember that, then let me show you this adjustment layer that does a really
good job in displaying this relationship.
Is the color of balance adjustment layer.
See that?
Cyan, red, magenta, green, yellow, blue.
Unfortunately, the selective color adjustment layer doesn't show it like that.
But it is the same color relationship.
I'll click on the reset button to reset my sliders.
And I'm going to go back into neutrals and I'm going to try to make her hair that blue
color we had earlier.
So I'm going to drag the cyan slider to the right.
I'm going to reduce the magenta and reduce the yellow to try to get a similar color to
what I had before.
And actually, I think it was more purple than blue.
Something like this.
And I'll select the zoom tool and zoom in, and you can see
how this adjustment effected the image.
And I can also click and drag on the black slider to adjust how it controls the brightness,
which in my opinion, does a better job than the human saturation adjustment layer.
Notice that we don't have those color issues with the shirt.
I can double click on the hand tool.
And from this point, I can create a hue and saturation adjustment layer.
And then just adjust the saturation accordingly, just to try to get the proper saturation for
my image.
What I'll do now is reset the hue and saturation adjustment layer and go back into the selective
color adjustment layer and reset it.
If you wanted to make her hair a different color, maybe red, you can just click and drag
the cyan slider to the left and it makes it red.
Like you can see there.
You can drag the magenta slider to the right to intensify that color and also increase
the yellow.
Like so.
If her hair is too saturated, go back into the human saturation adjustment layer and
adjust the saturation accordingly.
And I think that this gives us really, really good results.
You can see that my mask was not perfect, but it's still doing a very, very good job.
I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to the screen.
Now let me show you how to make black hair, much like mine.
So what I will do in this case is, I actually would use the human saturation adjustment layer.
First of all, let me reset the layer by clicking on this icon.
And what I'm going to do is drag the saturation slider to the left, to decrease saturation.
And I'm going to push it pretty far down to about 75%.
And then you can create a levels adjustment layer, and use these sliders to make it darker.
And let me quickly teach you how the levels adjustment layer works.
Basically, this handle controls what the darkest pixels of the image are.
If I drag it to the right, Photoshop will now make all the pixels this shade of gray
or darker, the darkest color in the image.
In this case, the darkest color of the image is black.
The opposite is true with the white point.
If I drag it to the left, then that means that all the pixels that are this shade of
gray or brighter will become white.
And the center point controls the contrast.
The point on the bottom left here tells Photoshop how dark the darkest pixel is.
By default, it's black.
But if I move this to the right, now the darkest pixel is no longer black, is this shade of gray.
This point tells Photoshop how bright the brightest pixel is.
By default, it is white, but if I drag this to the left, now the brightest pixel is this
shade of gray.
So what you need to do with your image is, adjust these sliders to get a realistic black
hair color.
And the reason that I left the human saturation adjustment layer to 75 and not push it all
the way to negative 100 is because I didn't want to completely de-saturate the image.
Even with black hair, there's still just a little bit of color in there.
A tiny little bit, and I wanted to leave that for my image and I just didn't want to completely
de-saturate it.
So now that we know how to make black hair, let's move on to blonde hair.
Which is a little more difficult, especially on images, don't have the proper detail.
If your image is completely dark and no detail, like a low quality image, then it's going
to be very difficult.
But let me delete this layer and create a selective color adjustment layer.
Once again, a fresh new, selective color adjustment layer.
And again, I'm using neutrals.
And from here, I can just increase the yellows like so.
Adjust the cyans, and then just try to find a natural blonde hair color.
In this case, I may want to also adjust the blacks to brighten up the darker pixels.
And I could also go into the levels adjustment layer and adjust the brightness of the layer
to try to make her look as blonde as possible.
I'll select the blue channel from the dropdown.
Then I'll drag this white point to the left to add a little bit of yellow to the shadows.
Next, I'll go into the red channel and I'll click and drag the black point to the right
to add a little bit of red to the shadows.
And then, I can go into the hue and saturation adjustment layer and adjust the hue accordingly.
And if I need to, in this case, I can also adjust the hue just a tiny little bit to get
the right shade of blonde.
Also, when you're making these intense adjustments, you may lose the highlights in the hair.
So let me show you one way that you can bring them back.
And the easiest way probably is to just to disable your group,
and with
just your original layer, you can press Control Alt and the number two.
That's Command Option and the number two, and Photoshop will select the brightest pixels
in the image, which include the highlights on our hair.
And what I'll do now is simply click on the original layer and press Control J on Windows,
Command J on the Mac, to duplicate the selected bright pixels onto any layer.
And I can place this duplicate layer inside of the group on top of the layer stack, then
change the blending mode to screen.
Before and after.
See that?
And then you can adjust the opacity accordingly just to get those highlights back.
And I think that looks much, much better.
Obviously, you can spend much more time fine-tuning the image and trying to make it as best as possible.
Also, I want to mention that you can always come back and fine-tune the hair.
For example, if I come in here and, and you'll notice that maybe not everything is selected
the way that it should be.
So you can always select the brush tool and just paint with white to add to the effect
or paint with black to subtract.
So you're going to have to fine-tune accordingly, and you're not going to be able to get it
perfect, but that's okay.
Just do the best that you can with what you have.
I'll double click on the hand tool to fit my image to the screen.
And this is my method for changing hair color in Photoshop.
Let me know in the comments below if you enjoy the technique.
Also, when I started the tutorial, I talked about painting hair back in.
I'm not going to do it in this video, but I do have a video where I show how to create
hairbrushes that allow you to do just that.
I'll place a link to it down below in the description.
That's my advanced hair masking tutorial,
so make sure that you check it out.
Again, the link is in the description.
And also, if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget
to click on the subscribe and notification buttons so that you don't miss any new Photoshop tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next video.