Photoshop Brushes Hair
Rode Strawther
Well, I've been using PhotoShop CS-6 for many, many years, and I had my techniques and favorite brushes for blending and rubbing in hair in a photo when doing cut and pastes that have hair involved, but with my new PhotoShop 2021 I am stimied. Can anyone suggest some brushes that I can use with my "SMUGE TOOL" that I can drag over the image and create hair like I used to be able to do? I need a kick start--where to get them and which ones will work the best. Surely someone out there has the same issues?
It's not hard making your own hair brushes though. Try single pixel full black with opacity set to fade for flyaway hair. I usually reduce the layer opacity for best effect. Always use fully hard brushes on their own layers.
A couple of this forum's regular posters assisted Dave Cross at one of his MAX workshops a few years ago, and he told us a story about masking a lady with flyaway hair. Scott Kelby and the other Photoshop Guys could not understand how he'd managed to do such an amazing job. The answer is that he had hand painted fine hair detail to the selected lady. That's something I have done for as long as I can remember, and it makes all the difference as it sounds like you already know.
Can someone suggest a tutorial on how to learn and create this effect in photoshop? Is it a brush or hand drawn? Masked layer? Still learning sorry so if I'm asking wrong I apologize. Thanks!
Originally posted at 3:51PM, 27 May 2012 PDT(permalink)
osakasaya edited this topic ages ago.
When I paint hair I go over it at the end with a regular old round brush set at 2 pixels and draw in the wisps. But you can find ps brushes already made. Just search google for photoshop hair brush or something like that. Good luck!
ages ago(permalink)
Here are two links, both for painting hair. The second one, which I favor most, is for realistic looking hair.
psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/painting/paint-realistic-hair/...
www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial...
When I paint flyaways, or wispy hair, it's best to do it by strand and tweak as you go along. I don't think brushes do much justice.
First begin drawing the wispy hairs out as you like it, it's probably best to begin with the hairs coming from the back. Try not to overdo the amount of hairs you draw. As you begin drawing in the hairs, go over the top of the hairs, nearest the roots, with a lighter color than the actual hair, and erase with a very soft brush at around 30% opacity. Typically you only see the ends of the hair anyways.
Continue this until you're satisfied with the hairs, and as you make your way to the front of the hair, using a very soft brush at 10% opacity, lightly blur the hairs. This way the hairs closer to the front will appear closer to us than those in the back.
The last thing to remember is that when wisping hair from the outside portions of the hair, you want to use a color that matches the color of the actual hair and you don't want to erase the top. If your background is dark, the hairs may need to be a little lighter, and you may need to erase at the top, but only erase the top portion that overlays the hair. Otherwise, you'll have random floating hairs. Lol.
I hope this helps! Best wishes.
ages ago(permalink)
Brushes. Let's talk about brushes real quick. I'm just gonna stay and I'm gonna come over here. Brushes, brushes, brushes and more brushes. There are different kinds of brushes. I like the, the brushes that we are using are kind of scatter paint brushes, so like these, these brushes here. These are scatter brushes. There are bunch of them. If you get the class there's a bunch of brush presets you get to download that already have these with the controls on 'em, and then this is a Brush Library. Now you use this in kind of an odd situation. Like let's say you have someone who the shot is really blurry and there's no fidelity to the shot, so how are you gonna pull the channel? There's nothing there. I often use pre shot-out images to use to make a brush, but not only that, I often use, I have a whole image library. I've got a zillion brushes. I can't even tell you how many hair files I have. And I have them so that if I need it, I can, excuse me, I can pull her hair and put that in anoth...
This is a fantastic course. But is clearly intended for very experienced PS users and retouchers. This backup materials, especially the workbook, are first class. She does speak too quickly and is a little difficult to follow. I felt like the right amount of material was covered. I would have loved more. But it needed more time to do it justice. She just seemed so rushed. I would have payed more for a longer class. Overall, I would highly recommend to anyone interested in this type of work. I found it fascinating.
If you love Photoshop and are serious about retouching, this is one of the best classes from one of the BEST instructors I've ever seen. It is fast pasted, but well organized and completely to the point. I don't know about you, but I prefer an engaging instructor that is passionate about her field and wants to give you as much information in her course as possible. The bonus materials alone are worth their weight in gold and should help anyone having trouble following along with her advanced techniques. I hope CreativeLive brings her back soon!
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Retouching hair is hard! Demystify how to best treat hair for beauty and compositing jobs. Lisa Carney will teach how to create the best mask for hair using channel pulling, selections and masking in Adobe Photoshop. Lisa will go over techniques for illustrating hair, creating custom brushes, using hair parts and using Layer Blend modes to your advantage. Retouch, composite and edit with hair with confidence!
When confronted with such an image I usually do use one of the tools from above + get something like 10 color samples from the hair, create a new brush that I adjust from photoshop's brush engine and start drawing hair.
PS: Just wanted to add that a situation where the background behind the subject is in a single color like in the sample I offered is rare, therefore an answer based entirely on same color selection won't help that much.
Now to start Apply Image. Multiply or Overlay are good options, sometimes you can even Apply Image twice. Here I applied the Hair Mask to itself with the overlay and lowered the opacity in the settings a bit to not lose the really fine hairs:
Now you can like ACEkin said use Brush set to Overlay. I prefer starting with Dodge and Burn though. Burn set to Shadow and I used Exposure of 12 then went over the hairs as carefully as possible. The more careful and time you take the better the results will be. This was maybe 3 minutes, not long at all:
Then at this point go ahead and switch to Brush, Black and fill in the inside. If you want you can first do Black set to Overlay and make another pass at the edges. Again, more time you take the better the results:
Now the background I picked doesn't really match the lighting and picture, but that's alright. Its not about whether the picture looks real, just about the mask. Could almost always take more time, this is by no means perfect, but here it is which is pretty good for the point of teaching the technique:
I didn't really think about the crop area when choosing a background image to drop in. Since its hard to see that particular area, here's with absolutely no changes to my mask, just got rid of that background for a plain white background for the comparison instead:
This is best done by selecting an area close to but not intruding the hairline touching the background. Then adding a mask and refining the mask is the best method for separating the hair from the background.
For the initial selection, you may consider choosing a high-contrast channel, duplicated it, and using the brush in the Overlay mode, paint the outside with white and inside with black. That will also give you a good starting point. You will still need to refine the mask but this second method may get you closer to the actual selection. For the critical parts you may need to manually paint the areas in the quick mask mode so that you can see the image while refining it.
You can start by selecting the background by color and tweaking it with a brush in Quick Mask, but in my experience I've never had very good results doing this by hand. Even if you carefully mask around each hair you still get a lot of bleed through of the old background. I usually just clip out the fuzzy hairs and that's usually good enough for small format, low-res stuff.
There are photoshop plug-ins that can do this for you quickly and easily. I'm not a professional retoucher, but I am a working Art Director and I've never been able to do as good a job as a these plug-ins for photoshop seem to be able to do, though I've never actually used on.
You also might consider the plug-in if the focus of your work will be on the hair. i.e. This will be in an ad for hair products or it's a full page ad that's zoomed in the hair and it would look sloppy if you just clipped out the details.
About a year ago, Pratik Naik wrote an article about a video the guys at FX-Ray made regarding hair retouching. At the time I found the video very interesting and quite educative. The only problem I had with the technique described was recreating a realistic looking texture. Since then I have found a perfect solution with Aaron Blaise's custom brushes. Best of all they work with almost any hair texture you could possibly be up against.
What really got me excited about his website were the custom brushes he offers. Some might not be really interesting for photographers or retouchers, but the pack with custom hair brushes is simply amazing. Whether you retouch animal or human hair, you will find a few useful brushes. But better than my words or a demo I could make, here is a video Blaise created to present his brushes:
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