In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to change hairstyles in Photoshop.
Hey everyone.
Welcome to the Photoshop Training Channel.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to composite new hair on somebody's head to
give them a new hairstyle.
We're going to work with this image here.
This is an Adobe Stock image.
You can download this at Adobe Stock image and the hair image that I'm going to use from
Adobe Stock; I have the links on my website.
You can use the free watermarked versions if you like.
So I have this image here that we're going to use for the hair.
I'm going to click and drag it on to the canvas and I'm going to scale this image up.
You want to make sure that the image that you bring in is pretty large so that you can
work with them undistorted.
Also, no matter what images you use, you got to make sure that the perspective is similar
and that the skin tones are also similar.
They don't have to be, but it makes the compositing job a whole lot easier.
Also, notice that this model has a highlight on the left-hand side of his face and so does
this one, so this image will work well.
We just have to color correct the image and also distort it.
The first step is to select the Lasso Tool and make a selection around the hair.
You can do a very loose selection if you like.
Then, click on the Layer Mask icon and we always want to work non-destructively so I'm
going to right-click on that layer and convert that into a Smart Object.
Now, I can press Ctrl T, Command T, to transform.
I can move this around, I can distort it, and what I'm going to do is try to place the
hair as best as I can on that face.
So, I'm going to bring down the opacity so I can see through the layer and better match
this layer.
You're not going to be able to get a 100% perfect match and that's okay, as long as
you get it close enough, you should be okay.
So I'm trying to figure out where the hairline is going to be.
If you're somebody who's into drawing, you'll know that the distance between the eyebrows
and the nose is the same distance between the eyebrows and the hairline, so I'm sort
of estimating that distance, just sort of eyeballing it there, so something like that.
You could also rotate the image if you want to try to match it better.
In this case, I think this will work.
So, I'm going to right-click on the layer and select Warp so I can continue warping
the image to, again, try to match it as best as I can to the head.
And I think that something like this will work.
I'm going to tap on the check mark, bring up the Opacity up to 100% and this will probably
work.
And what we're going to do now is try to match the skin tones and the hair so that it matches
our model, that way it looks more realistic.
So, I'm going to select that layer, the hair layer, and that's what I'll call it.
I'll call it "hair" and I'll create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer.
Click on this icon to clip it to the layer below it.
You could also press Ctrl Alt G, that's Command Option G on the Mac, to make that into a clipping
mask.
You'll see this down pointing arrow once you do that.
And what we're going to do is select reds because that is where the skin tones usually
lie.
If you noticed, the skin tones and the hair layer are pretty yellow.
So, we're going to go into the yellow and reduce the yellow.
Notice that as soon as we do that, the skin tones look much closer to the original layer.
I'm also going to reduce the cyan to add just a little bit of red.
Then, I can adjust the black slider to make it just a little bit brighter.
I'm going to go into the yellows and I'll do the same thing.
I'll reduce the yellows and maybe reduce the cyans as well.
So, that's before and after.
Notice that the skin tones look much better now.
I can then go into the blacks and adjust the black slider to adjust the contrast of that
hair, to make that hair darker, trying to match this hair to his beard as best as possible.
So, something like that would work; that's before and after.
We can continue working with our composite.
We can always come back and adjust the Selective Color Adjustment Layer later.
We're going to work with masking the hair out of the background, and to do that, we're
going to double-click on this smart object so that we can open that up in a new tab,
and from here, we can extract the hair from the background.
Since the hair is pretty dark and the background is white, we can use Channels to help us create
our selection.
We can click on each individual channel and see which channel has more contrast between
the foreground and background, in this case, maybe the blue channel has more contrast,
so I'm going to click and drag the blue channel on to the New Channel icon to create a duplicate.
Then, I can go into Image, Adjustment Levels, and create some contrast here to make the
background completely white and the hair, as black as possible to make that selection.
And I'm trying not to destroy the small strands of hair.
I'm trying to push it as far as I can, so something like that will work.
Then I'm going to select the Brush Tool and paint with black.
I'm going to make sure that my Opacity and Fill are at 100% and I'm just going to paint
with black inside of that hair.
Don't worry about being too precise.
Sometimes people spend a lot of time on selections and masks that they won't end up using.
So, for now, I'm going to do this very loose mask and if I need to refine it later, I'll
come back and refine it.
That is one of the advantages of working non-destructively.
I'm going to tap the X key on the keyboard to swap my foreground and background color
so I could now paint with white and remove some of these pixels, and notice that I'm
not being very precise once again.
And if you know anything about masks, you know that white reveals and black conceals.
So, we want to invert this channel to the opposite, so we can press Ctrl I, Command
I on the Mac, to invert.
Now the hair is white, which is what will be kept, so I'm going to press Ctrl, that's
Command on the Mac, and click on the channel thumbnail to make a selection out of the bright
pixels.
Then, I'm going to click on RGB to bring all the channels back, go into the Layers panel,
and I can just delete that layer mask and click on the Layer Mask icon to create a new
one.
So, now, we've extracted the background from the foreground.
I'm going to close this tab, click "Yes" and notice the difference now on our working composite.
At this point, I'm going to make a few more distortions to try to match the hair better
to my image.
So, with the hair layer selected, I'm going to go into Filter, Liquify, and I'm going
to use the Liquify Filter to adjust this.
Make sure that you have the Forward Warp Tool selected.
Also make sure that Show Backdrop is selected.
Under Use All Layers, select the background.
In my case it's the background.
It may be different for you.
You want to select the layer where the model is at, then under Mode, select Behind.
That way, when you adjust the Opacity, the hair disappears and all we're left with is
the model layer.
If you select something else like In Front, notice that there's a difference when you
adjust the Opacity slider.
If you select something else like "hair," then you really don't get what you want, so
make sure it's background or the layer where the model is.
And for Mode, Behind and then you'll get this effect.
Now, I can come in here and I can start distorting the pixels to try to match the contours of
the head and try to match the hairline and everything else.
Take this opportunity to style the hair differently if you need to and usually, large brushes
work best.
You can adjust the size of the brush by using the bracket keys on the keyboard and you can
always increase the opacity just to see what you got, decrease it and continue distorting
the image as you need to.
I think that looks pretty good for now and I'm going to press OK.
I want to point out that this is a non-destructive effect since we used a smart object, you can
see the Liquify label here.
If we were to double-click on it, it brings back the Liquify filter and we can continue
adjusting it.
The cool thing is that we can select the Deconstruct Tool and if we wanted to, we can deconstruct
that distortion that I made earlier.
I don't want to do that, but that option is there available for you in case you make a
mistake and you want to go back.
I'm going to press Cancel just so that I don't keep that reconstruction.
At this point, I can continue working with my hair layer so I'm going to add a layer
mask and I'm going to fine tune the mask that I created earlier, so I'm going to paint with
black and I'm going to paint with black so I can hide some of these pixels that I don't
really need; got to get some of these pixels here by the ear and the other ear.
I'm going to double tap on the Hand Tool and that's our result.
We're going to make a few adjustments to the shadows and highlights found on the hair layer.
To do that, I'm going to create a Curves Adjustment Layer and I'm just going to make a clipping
mask out of it.
This time, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl Alt G, Command Option G on the Mac, and
I'm going to make that layer darker now.
I'm trying to match the shadows here and I'm going to change the Blending Mode to Luminosity
so that we don't affect the color.
Notice what happen when I change the layer to Luminosity.
So, here's Normal; notice that the colors are adjusted, but if I change the Blending
Mode to Luminosity, I just control the Luminance values, and that's really what I want.
So I can adjust this layer to try to match it as best as I can.
And I'm only worried about that shadow at the moment.
Once I find that I have something similar, I'm going to select the Layer Mask, click
on the Invert button, and that is going to make a black layer mask, which is going to
hide everything, and then I can selectively paint in the shadows that I want, so I can
just come in here and paint some of these shadows in there.
And actually, one trick that I can show you, as for those of you that don't have a Wacom
tablet and you're not using pressure sensitivity, you can just paint with the mouse, once like
so, and then go into Edit, Fade Brush Tool and you can fade that brush stroke so you
try to match it as best as you can, so maybe something like that, and press OK.
And I'm going to go into the hair layer and I'm going to do the same thing.
I'm going to paint with black, hide all those pixels and then go into Edit and Fade, and
find a nice medium between both, so maybe something like that.
And that's what it looks like.
So, I think it might still be a little too bright, so I'm going to just darken that up
just a little more with the Curves Adjustment, so something like that.
Now I need to do the opposite.
I need to make some of these pixels brighter because you can see that shadow there on the
hair that's affecting the face.
So, I can create another Curves Adjustment Layer, then make a clipping mask and one trick
that you can do for something like this is you can click on this tool here, which is
the Targeted Adjustment Tool.
Click on the area that you want to adjust and then drag up or down.
In this case, I'm going to drag up and I'm going to try to match the skin tones as best
as I can, so something like that, and I'll do the same thing.
I'll come into the Layer Mask, hit the Invert button, and then use the Brush Tool with white
to reveal those highlights, and you can paint those accordingly and you get a much better
result; so that's before and after.
One thing that you may have noticed is that the hair has less quality than the model layer.
One of the things that you can do to fix that is go into the background image which is our
model.
Convert that into a smart object and just apply a slight blur.
Let me zoom in so that you can see and then go into Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and blur
the image, but only blur it just a little bit so that they both match, so maybe 0.4
pixels or something small like that, and that's before and after.
You can see the difference there, and press OK.
In the ideal situation, both images will be of similar quality.
In this case, they're not, so you do have to make up for the fact that the hair doesn't
have the quality that we're looking for.
So I'm going to fit the image to screen and one of the final steps is to make everything
a little more cohesive, so I'm going to select the model layer, which is the layer at the
bottom, which is now labeled Layer 0 [zero] and I'm going to hold Shift, click on the
layer on top and right click and put all of that into one single smart object.
That way, we can go into Filter, Camera Raw Filter, and we can adjust all these layers
as a single image.
I'm going to click on the Fx icon and I'm going to add just a little bit of film grain
and that just makes the image come together a little more since it has a cohesive effect.
Then, you could also try doing something like Dehaze and increase the Dehaze just a tiny
little bit, and that just gives it a little more punch.
So, that's before and after.
And you can press OK when you're done and this is our final image.
And that's it for this tutorial.
I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new.
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Thank you so much for watching and I'll talk to you again soon.