hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today
we're gonna revisit how to mask hair in photoshop
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let me know that too so we've covered how to mask hair in photoshop how to mask fur in photoshop
previously and that video hopefully will you know still be helpful but there's been some changes to
select and mask in photoshop so i wanted to make a refresher because the process for me
is is quite different now so i've got this image of pippi pippi has always been the hardest dog
of my own to mask because of her weird wispy pale bits right so i'm gonna basically use her as our
example with this image this is a raw file it's fine i'm not gonna do any other kind of bits of
the edit right now but to get a mask what i personally would do is i would go ahead and
do select subject so select menu you've got loads of different selection options in here and select
subject photoshop will make its best guess over what the subject is so you can see
the marching ants going around the edge here and that's showing that photoshop has selected piper
the subject which is great now if something was missing from this selection or the selection went
too wide as we can see here you can use your selection tools to go ahead and fine tune so
i would probably use the quick selection tool and it i leave it on plus but hold down option
on my keyboard if you want a windows that's alt and that basically sets it into minus territory
and you can fine tune your selection now at this stage guys it doesn't need to be perfect
okay so it's fine if it's a little bit rough you just need to have kind of the main i don't know
parts of your subject in and this works for horses dogs children anything with hair so when we've got
a rough selection of your subject you don't need to make sure it's you know absolutely perfect you
want to go and click selection mask if you can see it and if not select select a mask
so within the selector mask window you've got all sorts of other different options okay and these
options you've got your little mini toolbar on the left you've got your fine tuning up at the top
and then you've got your right hand panel which has got loads of other little selections in now
this is set up as i personally use select and mask so i like to have it on the red view because
it makes it easier for me to see what's in and what's out of our mask you can change that by just
clicking on the view and you can cycle through a load of other different overlay options that's
fine but i personally go for overlay with the red thing and then the red thing i put about 50
so i usually have real time refinement on you can use a high quality preview but if you've got a
steadier computer it might impact it and it might sound like it's going to take off or set on fire
so please be careful so this is how i set mine up most of the time and then we move down into our
extra settings now i want you to just basically ignore these for now um some of them are new and
we're going to go over to the left hand panel and just choose the refine hair tool which is this one
so that is like can you see it's like hair and then a brush so we want to click on that one
i want to go ahead and use a relatively hard brush in this instance of photoshop i do not want to
click the refine hair button it works okay for human hair it doesn't work particularly well for
animal hair so you know there you go using a quite small brush i want to not super tiny as you'll
note i want to make pick basically a starting point and then work around the dog now i usually
start i don't know why left side of the face here but because obviously that's got her back in i'm
going to start here on the edge of her ear so what i want to do is i want to be able to see the hair
so i can see a few little hairs on the outside of that selection and what i want to do is using
a nice small brush i want to be going around and just adding in little bits right because her hair
is wispy now you'll know that it's not doing a particularly good job i'll tell you why in a sec
but we'll just grab a little bit of her selection including that ear and then up around and you'll
note that where i'm holding my brush you see the cross hair right in the center i'm keeping that
on the edge of the subject so basically we've got like half the brush inside half the brush outside
and we want to just go around and complete so you'll see like this is not good that's
not a good mask there this is not a good mask and that is because we're basically using the
older version of select and masks kind of process so how it how that was picking our hair
and refining those edges for us to mask hair really well i found that in this new
edition so i'm currently in adobe photoshop 2021 and in this new edition over in your
refining settings section you've now got this little bit where it says refine mode which didn't
exist before now the refine mode as standard is usually on colour aware now colour aware
seems to work nearly exactly the same as the older versions of select and mask did by themselves
however if you click on object aware you'll get a little pop-up which says switching the refine
mode may result in a different edge do you want to proceed we click okay i mean guys usually i just
click don't show again but we click ok and what that will do is i'll switch it to object aware
now object aware works differently because it's not looking for color consistencies
it's looking for edges so if you switch to object aware usually your edges will
become so much better so if you see we've got such a better edge in principle there
and you want to just continue going down and including all of these little stray hairs
as you go along so using that logic when you end up with a mask let's pretend we've completed our
mask all the way around you then want to look at your refinement settings your global refinements
now i've just seen that we're on shift edge plus 10 so i'm going to put that at 0 which will shift
the edge back to where i originally wanted it to be and then we can look at do we want to smooth do
we want to feather do we want to shift the edge i would recommend if you're moving your subject from
an image to another or you're compositing i would shift your edge inwards just a little bit so that
you have a little bit more control over the situation that's going to unfold but for most
situations zero on all of them is actually fine so that's brilliant we don't want to decontaminate
the colors we don't want to do that and we want i personally always output to a layer mask but you
can output to whatever selection settings you want now when you've got this all set up and you're
happy with using all of your tools and you've got all sorts of bits here just click remember
settings and then it basically every time you open select and mask this will be exactly the same
which is helpful i promise so let's look at our mask a little bit because we've still got some
areas nowhere near as bad as it was on color aware but like here this is not a good edge down there
what we want to do is we can fine tune using the brush tool or the lasso tool and the brush
tool works pretty much exactly the same as it does outside and also it works the same as a selection
tool so if you want to add areas to your selection you just brush on with the little plus selected
if you want to remove areas from your selection let's say we made an accident over here you just
hold down optional alt it'll switch to minus and you can just whizz that off that just saves you
time it's way more efficient than going up here and clicking buttons in my personal opinion so
you you can go and fine tune i would just stay stay well away from the edge because the edge is
feathered out for a reason okay so you just want to basically be going and assessing any major
issues that have occurred during the select and mass procedure
and when you're happy with that you can just go ahead and output to your layer mask
and your entire mask will be shifted over here and there you have your mask which is ready to use for
whatever you want to and obviously you can then go in at this stage with a brush and just fine tune
some little edges up as needed and that's how you select and mask in 2021 i'll see you all again soon