Advanced Hair Masking With Channels In Photoshop | Phlearn

Today, i'm going to show you how to make advanced selections with channels that are going to help you create better cutouts. Hey there welcome to phlearn. My name is aaron nace, i'm so excited to show you channels. They are a very powerful feature in photoshop, we're going to use channels to refine our selection around our subject and be able to bring back more detail, especially in our subject's hair. So i want to go ahead and cut out my subjects the fastest way to do this is with select subject. So, let's go up here to select and then down here to select subject, let's go ahead and click there and you can see it's an automatic process. You don't have any control over it. It basically just selects your subject, and i got ta say most of the time. It does a very good job, but it usually needs a little bit of help, especially with hair and things like that, it's kind of difficult. So we have our selections around our subject. I'M going to go ahead and load a layer mask i'm going to click on my layer mask icon right down here there we go and that's going to put our subjects on a blank background. Now, just so, i can see what i'm doing i'm going to go ahead and create a solid color, fill layer and we're just going to make this white and then put this right underneath our subjects. Let'S go ahead and zoom into the hair of our subjects and it doesn't look bad, but if i hold shift and click on the layer mask for this subject, you can see there's a lot of detail in the original here. That'S simply not included in my cutout, and this is where channels come in by the way you can download the sample image and this psd on phlearn.com. You just follow the link down below that way. You guys can follow along so jumping into channels. The first thing we need to do is get our image back to how it was originally. So i'm going to hold shift and click on the layer mask which you can see just makes a black a big red x over my layer mask okay, it temporarily disables. It so now that we have that red x, we're gon na go to window and then down to channels, so we're gon na start with our channels by clicking on our red channel green channel and our blue channel. Now you can see skin and things like that. Look a little bit different depending on what channel you select and that's because it's kind of showing you how much of each color is in these channels. For instance, my red channel everyone's faces are pretty light because there's a lot of red in your skin in the blue channel they're pretty dark, because there's not a lot of blue in people's skin. Now the goal when using channels is to look for the most amount of contrast in light and dark. So, for instance, i want to cut out this hair, so red, green or blue. Well, in this case, and a lot of times with people blue is going to give you the most contrast, because the person's face or the person's hair is going to be darker compared to the background. So let's go ahead and duplicate that blue channel. We'Re going to simply click and drag it right here to the little plus icon, and you can see, i have a blue copy now. What i want to do is enhance this contrast. Okay, i want whatever like the darker object. I want to be darker and the background i want it to be lighter, so we're going to hit controller command, l for our levels and then i'm going to just make my darks a little bit darker. There we go, you can see we're enhancing this contrast and we're going to make our lights just a little bit lighter okay, not too crazy, but just a little bit. Something like that. There we go and we're using the difference between light and dark to make our selection. That looks fantastic, so let's go ahead and hit ok. So obviously this doesn't look great as an image, but keep in mind we're just going to use this to make a selection. Now, to turn a channel into a selection, it's actually very simple: all you have to do is hold control or command and click right here on the thumbnail, so controller command click there and you're going to see it's going to turn into a selection or you can Click on this little icon right down here on the bottom right, looks like a circle with a bunch of dots, that's going to go ahead and turn it into a selection. Now, a quick word of note: it always selects the lighter areas. Okay, so in this case basically selecting the background, so let's go back to our layers, i'm going to just turn my layer mask back on again just by clicking on it and our background is still selected. The light areas are selected. So what i need to do now is inverse my selection, because, basically, what i want to do is i want to paint my hair back visible right, because we can see the hair is just lacking a little bit of details. So let's go ahead and inverse our selection super easy to do, just go to select and then down here to inverse. So now the darker areas are selected, so the hair, the shirt sweater, even his hair. Anything that's darker than the background basically is going to get selected and now that it's selected, all we have to do is paint it visible on the layer mask. So let's go ahead and take a look at our layer, mask i'm going to hold alt or option and take a look at my layer mask here. We go now this little dots everywhere. That tells me that i have a selection. I personally find it a little bit in the way, sometimes when i'm trying to work, so i like to hit control to command h, to hide the selection. You can hit control or command h at any time to bring it back. Okay, so it's not deselecting. It'S simply hiding it visually. If this is the first time you've hit control or command h, it might ask you if you want to hide photoshop or hide extras. Just hit hide extras there we go so i'm going to hit controller command. H now check this out, because i still have my selection and remember: the selection is where the hair is because i still have my selection look at this, as i paint in i'm literally painting in more detail. Let'S go and zoom up here, so you guys can see this. I'M painting in the details of this hair so we're getting a much more accurate selection of the hair than we originally had through channels, and this is where the beauty of channels look at that. It'S amazing now, let's hold alt or option and i'm just going to click on that and we can see it in real time. You can see the hair just goes from. You know kind of looks a little fake paint this in there we go and it's a lot more realistic. Looking, so we're refining our layer mask through our selection that we made in channels this is going to work with this hair. Here you can see it's going to look a lot more natural now. I still do recommend using select subject because it's a fantastic way to get started, but channels, as you can see, are just a really good way to get more detail. Look at all that detail in the hair that we simply didn't get before now. I can do the same thing with our sweater, so i'm just going to make my brush a little bit smaller here again, because the sweater is darker than my background. I'M able to refine the edge of this sweater fantastic and we're going to go through and do this with the subjects here. Look how much more natural that looks! It'S really really nice. Now. This definitely works better. When you have a light, colored background and dark objects that you want to cut out, you're always looking for contrast. Okay, so that's what kind of what's helping us out here is the amount of contrast between our subjects and the background, but you can see my edges. Look much better there. We are and we'll just do the same thing down here too fantastic. Let'S go ahead and just deselect, because this area should be visible. So i'm just going to paint that white on my layer mask there. We go that looks good and then it looks like we had a little shirt that got cut out too. So we just need to make sure to include that shirt and look at that. Our subjects are really well cut out. I can make this background invisible and we can see all of this beautiful detail in their hair. So i want to just show you guys, a quick before and after to do that, i'm just going to duplicate this layer and then we'll just do select subject again. So, with just select subject, you can see the edges are kind of like a little bit gnarly, not like kind of crispy looking. We don't have all that much detail, and here with the channels we get a lot more detail. So here's the this is just with select subject and then here we are with channels. You can see way more detail in the edges, especially like here around the sweater select, subject kind of gives us this crispy crunchy edge. That doesn't look that good and once we introduce channels it softens it up and gives us a lot more detail now, there's millions of uses of channels, but basically the idea is: whenever you see a contrast between light or dark, you can turn that contrast into a Very accurate selection and then use that on a layer mask to cut out your subjects or do all kinds of other cool blending techniques follow the link down below you guys can download this psd and sample image. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video hit that little subscribe button down there we're going to send you a free tutorial every single week, thanks again and i'll learn you later bye, everyone you