How To Change Hair Color In Photoshop - Including Black Hair To Blonde

Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the Photoshoptrainingchannel.com.. My name is Jesus Ramirez, and you can find me on Twitter @ JRfromPTC. In this tutorial. I'M going to show you how to change hair color in Photoshop. We're going to be working with this stock photo and I'm going to show you how to change this woman's hair color to black red blonde and green.. Keep in mind that when doing hair color changes, it's a lot easier to go from light hair colors to dark.. One of the reasons is that lighter hair tends to have more detail and therefore you can make more adjustments. Going from dark hair to light. Hair is much more difficult.. For example, turning black hair into blonde hair is nearly impossible in a lot of cases.. That'S because the detail is lost in the shadows and darkness of the hair and the color changes. Often don't look realistic., But in this tutorial I will show you what I would do in that situation.. It won't be 100 % realistic, but depending on your photo and your goals, this might be good enough.. Another thing that I want you to keep in mind is that everyone's hair is different.. The numerical values for Opacity or other adjustments that I use on this photo may not work on your photo., So you will have to experiment and see what works for you., So pay more attention to the principles and the techniques and don't worry too much about the Numerical values that I use. Also for some color changes there might be more than one way to get the same result, which is why, in this tutorial I'll cover three ways of changing hair, color—all non-destructively of course.. So let's get started with the tutorial.. So the first thing I'm going to do is to click on the Quick Selection Tool. That way we can make a selection out of her hair and we can apply the adjustments only to the hair and nothing else.. So let me create the selection. I'm going to click on the Layer., I'm simply going to click and drag to select the hair.. Currently, my selection tool is a little small, so I'm going to increase the size by hitting the right bracket key on the keyboard and I'm going to continue selecting the rest of the hair and you don't have to be very precise, here. We're going to use the Refine Edge to adjust the selection and we're also going to paint on the selection later on., So you don't have to be too exact but try to get the larger areas of the hair. And if you make a mistake here, you can hold Alt Option on the Mac and in a way the selection on her hand, and this looks like a pretty good selection. So I'm just going to work with this.. Now that I have the selection, I'm going to click on the Refine Edge button in the Options panel., I'm also going to click on Smart Radius and I'm going to increase the size just a little bit., Also with the Refine Edge Tool selected. I'M just going to paint these areas here to refine that edge and any area where there's stray hair sticking out that way we have a nicer selection. And when you're done, you can press OK. Now, instead of applying the selection on to this Layer, what I'm going To do is create a new group, then I'm going to apply the Layer Mask to that group. - The reason I'm doing this is so that I can stack multiple Adjustment Layers inside of that group and it will only affect the hair. If I want to make any Changes to the Mask, I only have to do it on the group and not on each individual Adjustment, Layer. And you're, going to see what I mean in a moment., I'm going to create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer and I'm just going to make sure that That'S in the group, so Click and Drag on it and drop it in the folder and you'll know that it's in the group, because there's an indentation here to the left of the icon.. If they were outside the group, you would see that the icon is closer to the edge., So click and drag it put it in the folder and you'll see that indentation there.. So now, with the Hue and Saturation slider, I can make any adjustment that I want.. For example, I can Desaturate the image and my adjustment only take effect in the hair, because it's inside of this group and this Layer Mask is controlling the hair.. Now, if we wanted to turn her hair black, we would Desaturate the image using Hue and Saturation, but the Contrast is not good.. We want to make that darker. So what I'm going to do is click on the New Adjustment Layer, icon and select Curves just create a Curves Layer and darken that up. We can drag that down like so.. Now at this point, you can actually click on the Mask and you can come and make adjustments paint with black, for example, to hide some of those effects.. So I'm going to click on the Brush Tool and increase the size by clicking the right bracket key in the keyboard and just paint that in. Make sure that you have a Soft Brush. So I don't have a Soft Brush at the moment. I'M going to click on the Soft Brush. Make sure that hardness is at 0 % and I can continue painting in areas that I need to.. Now. If I go over to the line, that's okay, I can paint with white and bring back those adjustments in that area.. So that's what you would do at this point.. You would go around and see what areas you need to adjust in order to better improve the Mask.. So, as you can see, you can paint with Black and White on the Layer. Mask in the group. - And by the way, when I paint a Layer Mask, I usually have my hand on the X key on the keyboard. Notice, the colors here.. Every time I press X, they flip so black hides.. So I can hide the effect here. Press X again, it flips it to white and white reveals. So I can paint with white to reveal that effect.. So that's a little tip there for you when you're painting on Layer Masks.. I know that I can come in and further refine that Layer Mask, but this is going to be good for this tutorial, so I'll leave it there. Now. The hair looks pretty good, but it's a little bit unrealistic in some areas.. If I disable this group you'll see that the hair is not just one solid color, there are different, colors and tones in different areas of the hair. So I'm going to try and bring that in on to my black hair, to sort of take it one step further and make it just a little bit more realistic.. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to disable this group that we're working on have the original layer active. Then click in the Channels panel and hold Ctrl that's Command on the Mac and click on the RGB thumbnail here and that's going to create a selection of all the bright pixels in the image. Then I can come back into the Layers. Panel click on the original layer and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl J Command J on the Mac, and now we have a layer that only contains the bright pixels.. I'M going to enable the group that we are working on enable the original Layer I'm going to open this up, Click and Drag that Layer on the very top. Notice. What happened. We just gave that black hair some extra color in there and even though it's a little more realistic, this effect is a little too strong. So I'm going to bring down the Opacity, maybe to about 20 or 30 % I'll leave it at 31. I think that's good, so that's before and that's after., It's very subtle, but it makes the hair a little more realistic because you'll start adding just a little bit of color. And I'm going to Zoom In just so. You could see. That's without color and that's with color. And of course you can adjust the Opacity accordingly until you get something that you're happy with., I just like adding a little bit of color so that the hair is not completely desaturated.. At this point, you can start making other adjustments. For example, you can even create another Curves Adjustment Layer and simply start working with the highlights for example.. If you want to bring up these highlights here higher you can. Just bring this down and, of course you can work with the Opacity and adjust it accordingly. And obviously, since we're working with only one Layer Mask, you can come in and hide the effect anywhere. You want to, and you'll only have to worry about that one Layer Mask. I'm going to go ahead and Undo that.. So I'm going to collapse this folder and I'm going to rename it and I'm going to call this `` black hair.''. Now I'm going to create a new group., I'm going to hold Alt Option on the Mac Click and Drag that Layer Mask and Duplicate it.. So now we have the same Layer Mask in this group and we can start creating new effects.. So this is how to create black hair., But if you want to create red hair well, you can use the Hue and Saturation just like we did before, but I want to show you how to do it with the Selective Color Adjustment Layer and I'm going to Show you several different ways in which you can change the color of the hair, because everybody's hair is different depending on how you took the photo, the lighting, the texture.. There are so many different variables that sometimes Hue and Saturation might not be enough.. Sometimes you might want to use Selective Color, so I'm just giving you different options. So in your image you can try them all out and see which one works best for you.. So in this case, I'm going to click on this drop down. Menu—The, Colors Drop Down, Menu, choose Neutrals and I can subtract Cyan and that's going to make the hair Red. And I can add just a little bit of Magenta and a little bit of Yellow and we have red hair.. So that's before and that's after.. You can also come in here and add a Curves Adjustment Layer and start playing around with the Contrast. Maybe you want to change the Blend Mode to Luminosity so that you don't change the color. You just change the luminance values., That's before and that's after. And of course you have the Opacity slider to lessen the effect a little bit.. So I'm going to collapse this and I'm going to call this `` Red Hair.'' And I'm going to do what I did. Before., I'm going to create another group.: Hold Alt Option on the Mac Click and Drag the Layer Mask on to the new group and this time we're going to change her hair color to blonde. Again we could have used Hue and Saturation select the Color. But now I'm going to show you a different trick., We're going to use the Gradient Map Adjustment Layer. And, as you can see, the Gradient Map applies these colors to the Luminance values of the layer that you have selected.. For example, the darkest colors here are going to be black because we have black here., The brightest colors are going to be, white white is here.. This is another way in which you can make hair black.. So if I double click here on the gradient, you bring up the Gradient Editor., You can click on this swatch here and then at the midpoint. I can Click and Drag that to the right and you'll see that the hair gets darker.. If I double click on this swatch and select red now, her hair is red.. Obviously we don't want to do that.. What I want to do is I want to show you a trick, so we can get started at least on making her hair blonde.. I am just going to cancel this for now, and what I'm going to do is click on this down pointing arrow click on this icon here and select Photographic Toning press, OK, and it's going to give you this list here—different tones that you can apply to your Image. Now this one here looks a lot like blonde hair.. This doesn't look perfect, but it looks a lot like it., So we're going to use that as a starting point. This one here, if I right click on it and choose Rename Gradient you'll, see that it's called Gold number 2 and that's the one we're using Gold Number 2. So select that and with the Layer active you can change the Blend Mode to Screen.. Now it looks good, but maybe not perfect.. So if you're not happy with the results, you can try adjusting the colors by going into the Properties panel and double click on the Gradient Map to bring up the Gradient Map Editor. And I'm going to start adjusting these swatches.. These are just the starting point, and I know that I don't want white, and I know that I don't want black in here at all., I'm going to double click on this color here and the darkest color I want is sort of a dark orange. Maybe something like that., The brightest color is fine and I don't really need this brown and this light green color. But I am going to adjust this color here and maybe make that a little more yellow, something like this. Press OK. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a Curves Adjustment Layer and Click and Drag in the middle here just to darken Up the image just a little bit, maybe something like that. And when you're using that Gradient Map, you may not get the exact color that you want, but you can always add a Hue and Saturation slider and simply Click and Drag the Saturation or Hue to. Maybe I want this a little more red and maybe it's too saturated, so I can bring down the Saturation and get something like that.. At this point, I want to create a new Curves Adjustment Layer and I'm just going to darken it up.. This is going to be for the darkest areas of my image and I'm going to turn the Layer Mask black to hide the effect.. You can press Ctrl, I Command I on the Mac to Invert. And I'm just going to paint with white in certain areas. Here.. I'M actually going to bring the Opacity down even further, so maybe 22 %. I don't want these areas to be that bright.. I actually want these areas to be a little bit darker.. These are shadows this area here.. So that's before and that's after and I can always adjust the Opacity.. What I'm going to do now is show you how to add non-natural hair colors. So I'm going to create a new group., Hold Alt Option on the Mac Click and Drag the Layer Mask on to the new group here and by the way, this is blonde hair, so I'll rename that `` Blonde Hair ,'' and this one will be `` Colorful Hair.'' Then, I'm going to create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer and I'm going to click on Colorize, and maybe you want to turn her hair green. Now, usually, when I see effects where the hair is an unnatural color, maybe like green or blue or maybe even Pink or something like that, the hair looks unnatural because the saturation is bumped way up.. So you have to be careful with the saturation., So I usually like to bring the saturation down to zero and I like to just increase it accordingly and maybe somewhere around 30, and that might still be a little too much.. I'M going to bring it back down to about 24 and I'm just going to switch the Blend Mode from Normal to Color. Just so, I can use the Luminance values of the original image. Notice. What happened under the Normal Blend? Mode. It's a little washed out, but if I just switch it to Color, it's got a little more Contrast in it.. It makes it look just a bit more realistic and actually, at this point I may want to even bring down the saturation just a tad.. It'S a little too saturated for my taste, so maybe something like this. And if you still feel like you need a little more contrast, you can always go into the Curves Adjustment Layer and add something like a Medium Contrast and then adjust the Opacity accordingly. And again. I like to bring the Opacity to zero and just add just a tiny bit something like that. Now, when you have this set up, it's very easy to change the color.. Now we can click on the slider under Hue and maybe give her blue hair purple hair or whatever hair color that we want. At this point you may want to do that trick. I told you about with the black hair, where we duplicated the bright pixels in the image.. So we can also do that for this hair color.. So I'm going to press Ctrl, J Command J on the Mac, Duplicate that Layer—Layer 1 Click and Drag that all the way up above the color for hair color. Make sure that nothing else is enabled.. These three groups are disabled and that's before and that's after.. If I Zoom In you will see that it's not just green. Some color in there is very subtle and I can increase it more. So you can see. And I think it just makes it look a little more realistic. I'll bring it back down, because the Opacity was a little high.. So I'm just going to Fit to Screen here close this and that's the green hair. And, as I mentioned before, black to blonde is pretty hard to do in Photoshop.. Sometimes it can be impossible depending on your image, but I'm going to show you a few tricks in which you may be able to fool the eye. Again. This is not going to be photo realistic, but you might be able to get away with it depending on the image that you're working with.. So let me bring that image. Up.. Okay! So we're going to do the black hair to blonde using this stock photo here.. We have this woman with black hair and I've already gone ahead and created a Layer Mask using the same technique. I showed you earlier just so we can save a little bit of time.. So, as I said before, black hair to blonde is very difficult.. If you're going to do it make sure that the image you're using contains black hair with detail., If you have big blocks of black hair, it's just going to be too difficult.. So, even though this woman has black hair, I can see a lot of details on her hair and that's going to give us the best results. Again. This is not going to be photo realistic, but I'm going to show you what I'm going to do in this situation.. So I have my empty'' Blonde Hair'' folder with the Layer Mask of the hair., I'm going to press Ctrl and then click on that Layer Mask just so. You can see the areas that I'm selecting. And, as you can see, I wasn't very accurate which, like in the hair, but that's okay. I think this is going to work. And if it doesn't we'll fix it as we go.. So I'm going to press Ctrl D Command D to Deselect and I'm going to create a Gradient Map and we're going to use the Gradient map. We used earlier this one here, the golden gradient map. And I'm going to select it change the Blend Mode to Screen and that's going to do a pretty decent job. But I want a stronger effect.. Her hair is black and it's really hard to turn it blonde. Just with one of these gradient maps, so I'm going to click on the Adjustment, Layer, Click and Drag that over to the New Layer icon to Duplicate it and notice. The effect that we get. It definitely looks blonde. But we need to work on it a bit. So I'm going to bring down the Opacity to about maybe 64 % or so.. Then I'm going to create a new Curves Adjustment Layer and I'm going to Click and Drag that and bring this down to about here., I'm going to click on the Adjustment Layer. Layer Mask press Ctrl, I Command I to Invert turn that black. And I'm going to paint with white in areas where I want blonde hair to show darker—in the areas like here behind the ear and neck. This area here. And I can always bring down the Opacity and also I can paint with black., I'm not so happy with this area here.. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint with black. Then I'm going to go into the Fade. Command— Edit Fade, so I can fade that large brush stroke, so you can see at 0 % Opacity, it's exactly what we had before.. I painted it away 100 % Opacity as it's completely gone.. So I can slide this around until I find a place that I'm happy with so maybe about 52 %, And I can keep painting with white on that Curves Layer Mask in areas that I want to darken up. And one of the reasons I'm having problems right Now is because my Opacity is way too high., So I can bring that way down to like 10 % and really take my time and build upon it. If I want to., Obviously I'm not going to take too much time in this tutorial, but you kind of get the idea of what I'm trying to do. At this point. What I can do is create yet another Curves Adjustment, Layer and darken that as well. Maybe something like that. Also press Ctrl, I Command I to Invert, but this time I'm going to work on some detail., So I'm going to bring the Opacity up a bit more, maybe 65 % or so and use the left bracket key on my keyboard to adjust The size of my brush and make that really really tiny and I can start adding some detail in certain areas., And I know this is a little too dark, but I'm just going to bring down the Opacity and I'm using a Wacom tablet by the way. So it definitely makes it easier. If you have a Wacom tablet., You can do with the mouse. It may take you a little more time and you may not be as accurate., So I'm sort of giving her a little more detail in her hair because we lost some of it by applying those adjustments. So that's before and that's after and of course, that's a little too strong so again go to zero and start increasing the Opacity and as soon as it starts showing up, you can sort of release it, maybe around 74 % or so.. And actually, you know what I still think it's too much, maybe I'll bring that down. So we'll leave it at 54 %. At this point you may be happy with her hair or may not.. What I would recommend is creating a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer and just use the Hue to fine-tune the color.. Maybe you want more of a golden look, something like that and you can decrease the saturation.. Maybe you only want to affect the color, so we go to Color. Maybe you want to affect both the Color and Luminosity. You can just leave it at normal. That'S your choice.! I think in this case, for me, Color might be the better choice.. At this point. I can work in the Layer Mask.. I see some areas that are not being affected by my effect like this area here, so I'm going to click on the Zoom Tool and Zoom In to this area here and simply paint with white in this area and actually maybe increase my brush size a little Bit and decrease it for certain areas., As I said before, it's really harder to deal with black hair, especially in these areas. Here where the hair is very fine., There are several things you can do.. You can either clone out these stray hairs.. So, for example, I can just disable that create a new layer above the original layer. Click on the Clone Tool make sure that Current and Below or All Layers are selected. Current and Below will work fine for this. Hold Alt Option on the Mac. Then click on the area that you want to sample from and then start painting away those stray hairs. They're a little too difficult to paint in. So you might be better off cloning them out.. So I'm going to click on the Layer Mask again. Press B on my keyboard for my Brush Tool, then press D on the keyboard for my Default Colors and press X to swap my colors from black and white, and I can paint away the yellow here. That'S not working.! Obviously I can continue cloning, this area out, but that's something that you may want to do in your image.. Another thing that you may want to do is actually create a new layer on top of everything.. With the Brush Tool selected, you can hold Alt Option on the Mac, select the color of the hair.. In this case it's yellowish color and you can come in there and you can paint in some hair strands.. You can follow the strands that are already there and just create new ones.. Obviously this is going to take you some time, but this is one of the things you can do for those black strands that are hidden there in the background.. So I'm going to just double click on the Zoom Tool here to Zoom Out, and this is what our effect looks likes. By the way these stray hairs. The reason I created them outside of the group is so that they're not affected by the Layer Mask, because some of these strands of hair might go outside the main area, where the hair is., So having them inside of the Layer Mask may hide those as you Can see in this area here., So you want them outside. And if you do have this layer just select the top layer hold Shift. Select the original group and press Ctrl G Command G on the Mac. So you put those two items into a new group, and now you can see the before and the after. And that's it for this tutorial.. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new. If you have any comments or questions, leave them down below.. If you enjoyed the tutorial, don't forget to click that “Like” button and share this video with a friend.. 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