How To Change Hair Color In Photoshop - Easy Yet Powerful Technique!

Hi welcome back to the Photoshop training Channel. I'M mrs. 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 gon na, 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 on to another area like so, and I would use either of these methods to remove the flyaway hairs. Nobody'S gon na be able to tell that they were there to begin with, and if you want, 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 hair, so 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 gon na do now is focus on making a selection around her hair and that's gon na 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 gon na fine-tune it a little later on in the selected masks 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 under select and mask Button to bring up the selected mask workspace, I'm working with the on white view and what I'm gon na 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 gon na be perfect and that's okay, we're gon na 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 mask crash course, where I talk about this entire panel and what all the tools and sliders do. What I'm gon na do now is select the brush tool and I can add to my selection if this plus icon is selected, so I'm gon na click and drag and paint over the areas it should be selected. So if I accidentally be selected, something that shouldn't be selected, I'm just gon na 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. It should be selected like so then I'm gon na click on this minus icon and paint on these areas. It should be be selected. I'M now gon na 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. Ok, these are my results. Next, I'm going to output this a selection, so I'm gon na scroll down and make sure that selection is active on their output. I don't want to mask. I want a selection so make sure that selection is selected under the output, drop-down and press. Ok and Photoshop will apply. The adjustments to the selection and what I'm gon na do now is create a group and apply the layer mask to that group. The reason that I'm adding the layer masks to the group is so that one layer mask can control multiple adjustment layers, so I'm just gon na call this group hair color. It'S always a good idea to name your layers and groups and what I'm gon na do. Is I'm gon na show you why I don't like to use the hue and saturation adjustment layer? I know that a lot of tutorials tell you to use a hue and saturation adjustment layer, but let me tell you why I don't think that's the tool use and it has a lot to do with how difficult hair is to select. Let me show you what I mean: I'm gon na 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 hue and 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 it 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, although that looks much better, we don't have the shirt problem. I don't think that the colors and the hair look realistic. If we just have one single heel like that, that doesn't look that realistic to me and also with this adjustment layer, is 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 gon na do is create a selective, color adjustment layer from the drop-down 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 science 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 balance adjustment layer see that cyan red magenta, green, yellow blue, unfortunately, the Selective, color adjustment layer listen show it like that, but it is the same color relationship, I'll click on the Reese button to reset my sliders and I'm gon na go back into Neutrals and I'm gon na try to make her hair that blue color we had earlier so I'm gon na drag the sign 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 affected 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 in the hue and 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 screen. Now, let me show you how to make black hair much like mine, so what I would do in this case is, I actually would use the hue and saturation adjustment layer. First of all, let me reset the layer by clicking on this icon and what I'm gon na do is drag the saturation slider to the left, to decrease saturation and I'm gon na 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 hue and saturation adjustment layer 275 and not pushed it all. The way to negative 100 is because I didn't want to completely desaturate 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 Desaturate 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 gon na 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 science and then just try to find a natural Blonde hair color in this case I may want to also let just 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 blond as possible. I'Ll select the blue channel from the drop-down, 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 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 disable your group and with just your original layer, you can press ctrl alt in the number. Two that's command option in the number two and Photoshop will select the brightest pixels in the image which include the highlights on her hair and what I'll do now is simply click on the original layer and press ctrl J on Windows command, J on the Mac to Duplicate the selected bright pixels onto a new 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 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 gon na have to fine-tune accordingly and your not gon na 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 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 gon na. Do it in this video, but I do have a video where I show it how to create hair brushes 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 button 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