How To Change Hair Color In Photoshop

Today, I'm going to show you how to change hair color in Photoshop, hey guys and welcome to phlearn. My name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn comm, where we make learning Photoshop and photography fun and today we're going to be changing. Hair color in Photoshop and it sounds kind of easy, but it's actually really hard, and here are the reasons hair color is. It has to exist within a certain range to look natural right. You go to green or two blue. Something like that. Hair is not going to look natural, so that's a little bit tricky. The other thing is that hair has usually different colors in the highlights than it does in the shadows, even my hair, which is like super super dark, but when I get on the Sun, the highlights turn a little bit brownish. So that's kind of some things you have to think about when you're actually trying to change hair color and the other thing we're thinking about is, if you want to change. Hair color going from light to dark is a lot easier than going from dark to light. In fact, going from here like mine, like almost black hair, to blonde, that's nearly impossible in Photoshop, so we're not going to mess with that today. If you want that, if you want your dark headed subject, to have light hair in the end photo just get them a wig or something like that. But today we're going to be editing a redhead and we're going to go blonde. We'Re going to change your hair to brown and then we're gon na change her to black as well we're working on Daniels image today he submitted this in a contest recently and he's winning a phlearn pro tutorial because we're editing his image here on Fleur. It'S a great image and I love our hair color, but I thought this would be a cool opportunity just to show you guys how to change it. If you did want to do something like that, okay, so we're going to start off, she's got really nice red hair, I'm gon na start off using a justment layer and we're going to go down to selective color. Now I don't use selective color a whole lot, but when you need to take a color range like a you, know, red hair or something like that and just kind of push it and pull it a little bit. I find that selective color actually works better than hue/saturation. Well we're actually going to use hue/saturation adjustment layers later in this episode, but for the initial adjustments, I find that selective color really works well with hair okay. So here we go. We got a couple different options here: we're going to go to our black Channel and I'm going to pull this up and that's going to give us a lot more black, I'm going to pull it down and that's going to give us a lot less black. Okay. Let'S go ahead and give it a little bit less black there we go, then we've got our yellow slider. So if you can see you want to make it like a little bit more of a yellow hair, you can do that. Magenta is pretty much like red. You can push push that up, pull it down. It'S going to give you a little bit more green and then cyan is going to give you more cyan pulling. That down is going to give you a little bit red alright. So using these sliders you should be able to adjust. Let'S see, you can even go kind of crazy with the hair color. I that's not what we're going to do today, but you do whatever you want so using these sliders, you can see we can get like a light brown here we can get like a dark brown and usually by adjusting these guys, you can see it's kind of Adjusting your highlights and your mid-tones and your shadows separately there we go and something like that I feel, looks pretty good, so we're just going to go ahead and close that up so most of the work you need to be done doing can usually be done with A selective, color layer, okay, let's go ahead and say that's our brown copy, so we're just going to grouped out together and we're going to call this brown so very simple, just to take some of the red out with using a selective, color layer. Okay, next we're going to tackle is our black hair. So for this we're going to create a new layer, I'm going to go ahead and group that with itself and we're going to double click and call this black hair. Okay, now in our black hair group, what we're going to do first, we need to take all the color out of our hair. So I'm going to go to my hue/saturation adjustment layer, we're going to click right here where it says master. I'M gon na go to my reds and then we're actually going to click on this eyedropper and then choose this color right here. So this is like we're going to take this color and we're going to take all the color out of it so bringing saturation down to zero. Now you can see it didn't include things like this color here, so we can use the plus eyedropper and get it to include that hair color as well. Now, if you wanted to eyedropper, you could click on the skin, but you can see the skin tone was actually really similar. Some of these colors that are in the hair, so we're just going to use a layer mask to get those out okay there, but we can see the background which is blue, still stays the same color okay. So what we're going to do now? We'Re going to use our layer mask and I'm going to paint black on the layer mask overtop of her face now. If she had a skin color and a hair color that were completely different, you wouldn't have to use a layer mask, but in this case I do have to use a layer mask all right. There we go so this is taking the color out of her hair. Now the next thing we're going to do after we finish our layer mask and I'm going to revisit this layer mask in just a little bit. This is it's almost there, but it's not quite there. The trick that I want to show you guys is right here at the edge of the hair. I want to bring my float really low with my brush and choose a nice soft edge brush and just kind of like a fade this into the hairline. Just a little bit: alright, there we go so this is a good start. It'S not perfect just yet, but it's a good start to what we want to do with the hair, so we're taking some of the color out there we go and we can see it looks a little bit more natural there. So now what we're going to do is grab an adjustment layer, I'm going to go to curves and we're going to bring this down so we're going to click right here in the middle and just kind of like bring this down now you can actually use the Same layer mask from one layer to another one, it's super easy: all you have to do is hold alt or option and click and drag from one layer mask to another one, and it will copy it really quickly and easily from one layer mask to another one. There we go and this layer mask because we need it. We didn't select out the background in the first one, so we need to go ahead and make sure we do select that out as well. So again, I'm just using the brush tool. Here there we go and painting black in this area, alright, and it's going to be totally up to. You is like how how detailed you actually go when you're working with your layer masks in here I'm doing a relatively quick job in this tutorial. Just because it's you know, we just want to make sure you guys can actually learn this and you don't have to spend two hours watching me. Use my layer masks and things like this, but this is a really great way to just kind of darken the hair. Now let's say we wanted to go like more of a gray color, let's just click on this curves adjustment layer and instead of bring it down, I could bring it up a little bit and she'd have a little bit more of a gray color, so we're using One layer to take the color out and then different layers to define how light or how dark it's going to be. Alright, that looks pretty good that dark now we're going to let's go ahead and close this out. We'Ve got a couple tricky areas here, where we've totally D saturated right now, instead of just taking this layer mask and making this invisible here, because this is, it's got all that red color in there right. We don't want the red color back. We just want skin color back in there. Well, we should see kind of between the little bits of hair. So, instead, what we're going to do is a new layer, I'm going to grab my brush tool and we're going to grab a skin color there and we're going to change our brush. Sorry, our layer, blending mode to color. There we go down to color and there we see we can actually paint with the skin color and bring some of the skin color back in between the hair, all right. So that's bringing a skin color back instead of the red color that we started with just going to lower the opacity that just a little bit to make it look a little bit more realistic, all right. There you go and you can see how fading it right here, fading the scalp into the hair works quite a bit better than just kind of like you know, using it really really blunt all right there we go and we're just going to fade that dark area Back in as well all right now, if you are going black, there's one more thing that I would suggest and that's adding some highlights after you've graded the black because black you know it's going to like show the nice shine and things like that. So we're going to add some white highlights to it. So for that what we're going to do is I'm going to grab my brush tool and we're going to paint with white and I'm just going to paint right over some of the areas that actually have shine. Like here in her hair there there we go and right down there. Okay, now we're going to use blend if to have this only visible where the underlying layer is lighter. So super simple, just double click on your layer here we're going to bring our layer style way over there and I'm going to hold alt or option and we're going to go from left to the right. And now I can just define how much of a shine I'd actually like. So the farther I bring this to the right, the more it's kind of kind of going to blend, and the farther I bring this more. It'S just going to focus just on the highlights. I think something like that looks pretty good, so turning this off and on looks really good. Now, if you did want to add a little bit of color, let's say it's like okay. I want my hair to be pretty much black, but I want like a little bit of brown over top of it. It'S not too hard to do just grab a color. Maybe I'm going to use a color that I find here in the skin there we go something like this nice Brown and then you can just use like an overlay blend mode and you can add a little bit of color back into the hair all right. So it's like black, but it's got some highlights on there. Let'S just lower the opacity a little bit. It'S got a little bit of brown in there I kind of like the full black, but that's a good way to do it. Alright, so first we've got our regular red hair and then we created the brown here and then we just created the black hair. So blonde hair is probably the trickiest of them all, because we want to take some of these darker colors that are in the hair. Not only do we want to change the color, but we want to lighten it up a little bit and that's going to it's really tricky to actually make it look good. So we're going to start off we're to create a new layer. Let'S go ahead and group. It together double click here, alright, and we will just call this group blonde and we're going to start off. Basically the same way. We started off with the brown layer we're going to create a selective color there we go and we're going to choose our Reds here. Pull down our blacks and then let's go ahead and pull up our yellows and we're gon na just the magentas and the cyan. So we're going to start off really similar. Here there we go looking pretty good. Now you can see with our layer mask it's actually affecting her lips and things like that. We want to make sure to paint black on the layer mask over areas like that. So it's giving us the natural color on the face. Again. We really only want to actually adjust her hair. Okay, that's a good start now. The next thing we need to do is add a couple layers of highlight into the actual hair. So we're going to create a new layer, I'm going to use my brush tool and we're just going to grab like a nice blond color here, something like that. Basically, most hair is going to exist in, like the orange color range. It'S just going to be like how light or how dark it is and how saturated it is things. That'S a blonde is going to be right about there now we're going to grab our color and basically, I'm just going to paint right over top of our hair. We'Re going to change our blend mode from normal to screen and what screen does is it allows your colors to blend together, but it's always going to lighten whatever you paint on there so like. If I was painting black, for instance right now, it wouldn't even show up, because it black obviously lightens nothing right. So screen is just a really nice way to add highlights. So if you were painting green right now, you could use this to add green highlights. Okay, now, a lot of people would just kind of like lower the opacity and that's okay, but it doesn't look realistic because you want your highlights again to just show up where they should actually be highlights. So, instead of lowering the opacity, what we're going to do is I'm going to use blend if again and we're going to target just the highlights so hold alt or option, and I'm going to grab this underlying layer and we're going to pull this from the left. To the right there we are, and depending on how far you pull this, it's going to just show up like how much you're actually going to wind up affecting there. We go and let's lower our opacity just a little bit. That looks pretty good. I'M going to use my eraser tool and just erase it from the background and some areas that we don't need and again remember we're like what we said earlier going lighter is going to be a lot harder than going darker. So if you know, if you want to make a blonde - or you know, brunette into you know having black hair super easy to do, you guys saw that was not too difficult, but going going lighter in the blond is actually a little bit more difficult. Alright, there we go, and let's just paint that right back game, okay, we're looking pretty good. I do want to take care of some of these areas that are a little bit darker and for that I'm going to use a levels, adjustment layer and we're going to target our darks and kind of change, the color of those so a levels, adjustment layer. So, let's just go down here to levels now, what we're going to do is I'm going to grab my Reds and I'm going to pull my output levels just like this, and what this is going to do is basically going to say. The darkest point in Reds is just going to get a little bit lighter, so you can use this like color your blacks to a little bit more of a red, so we're going to pull our Reds up just like this, and then I'm going to pull my Greens, up to Matt there we go, you don't want to go too far to where the image looks screen. Keep it right about there, and this is a total visual thing. It'S going to depend on both where your read levels is where your read level is as well as where your green. There we go too far. It'S going to look green, not far enough. It'S going to look red, but right about there we're looking pretty good. Now I need to keep my blacks intact as well, so I'm going to go back to RGB and I'm going to pull my black levels in just a little bit there we go looking good okay, let's pull those back out just a little bit now. Basically, I'm going to hit command-i on the layer mask there and I'm going to paint white on my layer mask just over top of my hair, and this is you're just going to help all those dark areas. It'S going to make them a little bit lighter and add some color to them. There we go and it's going to add a little bit more color to the hair in general. All right, I'm already going to tell that. I'M going to lower the opacity on this because it's a little bit too much and it kind of just looks fake again. Making realistic blond hair is tough. Here we go alright that looks pretty good. Let'S go ahead and lower the opacity on that and then we're going to basically do the same thing we did with the white highlights on the black hair, we're going to add some white highlights onto the blond hair. It'S going to make it look even lighter, so we're going to create a new layer, I'm going to go over to my brush tool again and I'm going to paint white this time again on the hair. There we go and I'm going to double click here. Go to our layer style again, the same exact technique hold alt or option and go from left to the right, and this is just going to pinpoint it to the lightest areas all right and then it's totally up to you to change your blending mode. You can just change your opacity here if you'd like to lower your passive a little bit, you change your blend mode to something like an overlay or a soft light, and that's just going to help it blend in a little bit better as well all right there. We go I kind of liked how it looked in soft light. Alright, that looks pretty good now, just kind of looking at this might be like the wrong I'm going to take the hue and just kind of like push this a little bit to the left. A little bit because I felt like it was a little bit too yellowy. I don't know it's just needed a little bit more like not yellow in it, so we're just pulling the yellow to the left a little bit all right and then I'm going to paint black on my layer mask here over top of the face, all right. Very nice, I think, we're looking great and if you want to just add a little bit more brightness in it, that's where I would suggest grabbing a curves adjustment layer and just kind of pulling that up, and then we can paint in some of the brightness here. Like in some of the areas that we just needed to be a little bit brighter, because this is supposed to be blond all right, she looks more like a dyed blond than a natural blond. She has, you know her roots are showing that's. Okay with me all right: there we go. Let'S go to our hue/saturation: let's see if I bump our saturation up just a little bit or take it down, I'm okay, taking it down actually just a little bit all right, very cool, so you can see the blonde was pretty much the hardest out of the Entire group - and I would go in here and fix up my layer - mask just a little bit like this - needs a layer mask on it. There we go paint black on there, just so we're not covering up any of the any of the skin, because it's going to make the skin considerably lighter all right. So there's our blonde, pretty good! We'Ve got our original image. We'Ve got our brown hair, which was super simple to do, and we've got our black hair and then the hardest of all we've got our blonde hair and if you want to make these any more realistic, just lower the opacity a little bit - and I feel like That'S going to help these in these effects. Look a bit more realistic guys thanks so much for watching phlearn. I hope you enjoyed this episode if you're planning on buying your own hair, do it in Photoshop first next time, and you can see how it's going to look before you have to do it for real on your own head. If you like, what we're doing here at firm be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel comment down below, if you have any ideas for episodes and be sure to share this with your friends and family and other people you just meet on the street randomly they Might not like it, but do it anyway, i'll phlearn, you guys later yeah. Alright, I feel like a crazy person. Tolu