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How to Select Hair in Adobe Photoshop CC

Hey there in this video, we're going to look at some of the really tough stuff to mask, like this kind of out of focus here. Also this white t shirt because it's against a white background, we're gonna mask it out, stick it against this brick wall using Photoshop new select and mask technique. I love it, it's easy and I'm going to show you how to do that now in Photoshop. Alright, first up, let's go to file, let's go to open and let's go to select and mask one and two. Okay, so we're going to copy out the model master and put her onto this background here. Now, in terms of this image, I try to find a tough one. It has two things bad. One thing good. One thing good. It's it's it's a professional photographs, everything's in relative focus if you're shooting your own stuff and it's kind of out of focus and it can be really tough. Now, the cons for this one over here, Okay, it's not a con, but I guess that's what we're here for, right? How some tough stuff. The other tough thing is when t...

hey say the shirt here matches the background, Okay, it's quite hard to mask. So I'm going to show you tricks to get around both of these. I was tempted to find an example. That was absolutely easy and perfect, but that'll just make you feel bad when you're doing yours and it's not quite working. So this is going to get us like it's going to get us like 85, awesome. It's not absolutely perfect because just here is tricky, especially when it's not quite in focus like here and when the models t shirt matches the background is a little bit tough as well, but it's real world people, let's let's do some real world stuff. So this thing is called select and mask. If you're using an earlier version of Photoshop maybe 2000 and 17 or before, it's not gonna be around, which isn't cool. But if you're like me with Photoshop 2000 and 18 or 19, it's gonna work great. So how this works is you need to start with the selection. So the way this thing works is you need to start with the selection, we're gonna start with our quick select. Ok, so you need to start with the selection a reasonably good one and then the selector mask is going to do the kind of final touch ups. So I've got my quick selection tool selected. I've gotta brush, it's about 300 and I'm going to start painting her in. Okay. Really broadly to start with him, we'll we'll fix it up as we go. So I'm letting go, I've got auto enhance on slows the machine down a little bit but it does make your selection a little better and especially when we're getting to this hair stage and this when it's really hard and not a clear background foreground definition, I figured, let's turn it on. Okay, so there's the big chunks in now. I'm gonna zoom in a bit and just kind of work a way around the edge to make sure I've got everything in there. So you know, we just start over here. Let's let's leave that to select the mask, the Wispy stuff. Let's leave. But the stuff that's absolutely 100% here here not mixing with the background, it should be easy enough to grab. Okay, well at least make sure it's in your selection there. I have to remove a little bit there, move a little bit there. The auto enhance is making this a little slow. Okay, so what I might do is just show you the basics, click to add, hold down the option key on my Mac or no key on a pc. Just to tap and remove and I'll get the editor to speed this up. Come on. All right, you're back. Um I was probably at that another 90 seconds two minutes just to kind of get the basics in. Okay, So once you've got a selection then you add a layer mask like we did before just click on the layer mask button, you can see it's okay around places and bad in others, I'm going to zoom out now. Here's the magic. It's this thing here called selector mask. You just gotta make sure your mask is selected not the actual image. The mask, click on it here or up here in your app bar. Okay. Either one, give it a click and we get into this view Now yours by default is probably set to onion skin. I'm not sure when I'd ever use that. What I use is one of two. It's either against black and I have 100%. I have the capacity of 100% gives me a really good contrast. So my great selection, it looked okay in the last view, it looks terrible against black and I guess that's just a good way of looking at it right now. If it was a dark object or dark image, I could go against white and that would give me a better contrast but against black is going to work for me now, yours might be all tucked up like this now over here are kind of like global changes, it changes it to all the edges all the same and over here kind of more individual changes. So in this case, if it was, if it was just a T shirt like it was a product shot, I could probably just do it with playing around with these global changes but because there's so many different things happening like here and this is live but then the skin has got good contrast. I find her to go jump straight to these tools over here. Let me quickly run through these. I never use edge detection, it kind of goes around the whole thing and tries to fix it all. I haven't found that good in my experience, you might love it under global refinements, there's two that I end up using. Okay, smooth and shift edge. Watch this. I'm gonna crank up smoothing. It takes a little while because it's quite a large image. Okay. And it's just going to kind of try and smooth these edges and that's really good when it's a single object. Like if it was just this t shirt that would be, it kind of smooth around the edges. Makes everything look nice. This key here is quite handy. Can you see it says show original or just tap the p key on your keyboard. See before you've got to give it a second, stressing out a little bit. It's a big image after wait for it, wait for it. Okay, editor will zoom in real close. Ready, I'm going to turn it off, wait, wait, wait now there it is and turn it back on and that's how smoothing. So that's really good for a really large object. I'm going to turn it completely off for the moment because it's too generic. It's working on all the edges and I want to just work on them individually. Shift edge is the other one that I use and it just tucks out, let's show you the opposite. Let's go out, shifting it out. Just kind of expands the selection a tiny few fractions of a pixel and then if I take it in kind of goes in a little bit. So in out I find that's quite handy if there's kind of color bleeding around the outside. I'm going to leave it at zero for the moment and I'm going to work on this bit individually. So the magic trick really is this brush here. The second one down this is going to is called the refine edge brush tool, like it says there, okay, and it's really good for here. So how big a brushes you have? You're gonna have to experiment. It really depends on the kind of overlap you want. And so for me, this size brush, okay, it's 200 pixels and I watch this ready for the magic. Pretty cool. Huh? Okay, so it's gone through and looked and kind of play with the contrast now, just so you know, this is not going to be like I said at the beginning, it's not gonna give you 100% perfect everything Okay, But it's definitely the best option there for selecting here. You can see it gets a little bit foggy around here. So I'm going to undo and maybe go to a smaller brush and just kind of painting little parts and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit, don't give them too much because it gets it gets a bit messy in here and there's a bit of here over here. There it is there. Okay, now, the further you go around right there, it's quite wispy around here. So I'm happy to use a bigger brush, the further I go around where there's not much you can use a smaller brush. Okay, and just straddle the mask and the image just kind of run it along the center there and it just gives you a nice kind of blend across the two. You can see there are some amazing stuff and there's some horrible stuff so far. Pretty amazing. I love it. Okay, so I'm just working my way around the edge and little pieces only because often I have to go and undo it because I might have grabbed something I didn't want to or it's just gone a bit yucky. What ends up happening is if you are too big a rush, you end up in here, it ends up getting kind of ghost ian here. Okay, so I'm going to undo a couple of times. Edit step backwards back to my brush now, where you have to be a bit more precise is where you go from, like this kind of wispy hair stuff to a nice solid edge because if you don't, you can watch this goes a bit manky in there. So when we get to this part, we're going to use a different trick. So if I got all the hair now, good enough. Okay, so where it gets to this white edge here, this is the other tough bit. So using this tool here, it's not going to work, we have to be a bit more brute force about it because if I just painted in the background is too close to the color of the t shirt. If this t shirt was bright blue, it would work perfect. You could just run the brush along the edges, maybe make a smaller brush and it would work fine. But again, I wanted to pick a exercise that was quite tough so that you've got the tools you need. So we're going to use this tool here and it's nothing fancy. It's just a big kind of like blob brush and you can either add to the selection or remove from it. So I'm going to add to it. I'm going to zoom in and basically we're just kind of try and tidy up this edge by painting it in. Okay, It's not very sexy. What I might do as well where the brush is concerned, can you see my brushes quite? It's got a really strong edge here. What I want to drop it down is I find it's going to depend on your image, but between 80 and 90 is kind of I find gives you a nice crisp edge but with enough fuzziness to match the focus of the camera. Okay, because it's never going to be 100%. So I'm just going to kind of work my way along here just tidying in things. Okay, this is the painful bit. If this, like I said, if this was a colored a really nice strong contrast black t shirt would be perfect. We wouldn't have to do any of this. But here we are. So this bit that's poking out. Same like we did with the quick selection tool to remove from this mask. We hold down the whole key on a Pc or the option key on a Mac and just kind of just clicking a few times. So how much do I want to go around and do this? I don't want to do it at all. But what you've got to remember is I've spent hours working on masks only to find out that like where it's where it's going to end up. It's quite a model background. So you're not gonna see any of this like, you know, it's kind of in and out a little bit because of my quick selection tool, but to be honest, I know the final result. It's going to look fine because the background is quite forgiving, let's say. So now we're back into some high contrast. So let's go back to that lovely tool here. Okay, and watch this ready city. Cool. Huh? So I'm gonna take my peaky before after. So where there's strong contrast super easy. Just run along the edge and it magic set up the smaller the paintbrush, the more you zoomed in the better I'm holding the space bar, clicking, holding and dragging with my mouse. Okay, so now I'm just gonna make my breast a little smaller and just click hold it goes fuzzy while it's doing this a little bit tough to know where you're going and you can see there, it's not as great. This is because it's quite white against this edge where it's got a really easy contrast, it does a whole lot better. Okay, you can see it's there. So if there's if she's had really pale skin, it's gonna be super tough and you have to get in with a really small paintbrush. Okay, and see if you can fix it up. Don't worry if you don't if it's just a little tiny edge like this, I'm going to show you a last little trick we're going to use To kind of fix it up to them for the final one. Now I should work around this edge. I'm not going to because I know it's going to look good because remember unless it's going against black, which is a terrible idea because it really shows the mask. This is looking pretty good. So the last magic you can do is this one here. So I'm gonna twirl up global refinements and go to output settings. Let's click on decontaminate colors. Ready city be amazed. Ha, okay, it looks for like the color creeping around the outside. So you know how if I put something in front of a like a bright green backdrop that green kind of leaks around the edges. This helps to remove that. There's only one drawback with it and I'll show you what it is and it's worth living with but it's kind of weird. So I figured I'd show you it, you can see it's going to output to its own layer with a layer mask. That's great for me click Ok. And what it's done is can you see its own layer in? Its own layer mask? There's the original. Okay, and there's the new one. Okay, so you've got this one always because this one here that it made, because we turn decontaminate colors on it does this I'm going to right click the mask and say disabled. Go away for a second. You see what it did to the edges there. It's really weird. Kind of put him into a super high contrast. For whatever reason it needs to do that to get rid of that kind of color cast creeping around the outside. Um I'm not worried about it. Just need to know that that's happened. Don't worry though because on this original layer, he's still fine. If you decide not to use that decontaminate colors, it looks perfect. It doesn't do that weird stuff. So I'm going to enable my mask. I've got this layer selected. I'm going to grab my move tool, click, hold, drag, drag, drag to go to drag drag drag it's so big scale it down. You remember that's command t on a Mac controlled Tianna pc. How low do I want it to be just getting to fit in return. That's pretty cool. Huh? Zoom in. Okay. And it's just done a really nice job of the hair and the bit where I bothered to touch other t shirts looking better and they'll be there. I do have problems with now. Okay, so you can go back, select on this and click, go back in and do select the mask again. Okay? And just use the paintbrush to tidy up those sleeves there. Let me click. Ok, I'm not gonna clear okay, because it's given me a duplicate. So I'm going to undo because I didn't do anything. Get back on buddy. All right. A couple of last things you might do to just kind of get these things to work a little nicer is I often find a drop shadow um to the actual subject can often help it. Um what do you call it, settle in the image. Okay, so with layers, I'm going to give it a name. I'm gonna call this one model. Okay with it selected. We're going to go to a fix and go to drop shadow. Now mine's remembered what I was doing when I was experimenting with this. So um what I done and instead of having like say um let's have a look, I'm gonna crank it up instead of a drop shadow kind of cast from an angle, let's say that angle there. What I'm gonna do is have no distance and have the size right up. You can see it just puts a kind of like a halo effect around it and I probably won't have the capacity so high and don't even a little bit more and it's just to watch this preview on preview of just helps it settle in there a little bit more. You might not like that, you don't have to do it. Let's click Ok, One last thing you might do is the levels. Okay, so this image here is it feels like this one here is quite rich and quite dark. The mid tones are quite dark, or is this one? The mid tones are quite bright. So to kind of get them to match a little bit, we need to either play with the levels on the background or the model. It really depends on what look you're looking for. I'm going to do it for the model so with the model selected, I'm going to go to adjustments and I'm going to go to levels were getting pretty complicated here. I know, but I really wanted to give you the full thing of how to do it, some properties here. I'm going to make sure it's only affecting the layer underneath. So remember that little thing there says just affect the layer underneath, you can see a little error there says levels only affecting the model layer. I'm gonna grab the mid tones and just kind of dark down a little bit. You can mess around with the highlights and the shadows to kind of get it to match your version, okay. Or at least the images that you're working with and I feel like we're there in retrospect, I probably would have painted over this more than once. Okay, You can see it's still leaking some of the light through. I would probably painted in a couple of times to get it to be a little bit crisper. It probably would have let a little less of the fluffy hair through, but probably what I would have done. Alright, Friends. So the basic rules are, if you're writing them down, it is make a basic selection using the quick selection tool with your mask selected, use this select and mask, which should be called super awesomeness. And then unless it's a really kind of even selection or kind of even edge shape instead of using this global stuff on the right, start working around the long way with the paintbrush, but it's not actually that long because it's pretty amazing. Let's hit cancel and I will see you in the next video