-
Problem with cutting out blonde hair on a dark background
I recently did a photo shoot with a model using a ring light,I did not think about how hard it is going to be to cut out the individual hairs of the model due to the limited lighting.
I consider myself intermediate with Photoshop but I just cannot make a start in cutting the hairs out as layer masks give a lousy result and so does cutting it out by hand using a combination of the selection tool and the eraser. I have also tried the background eraser tool but it gives results similar to the previous methods.
Screenshots + Picture:
-
2 Replies
-
Another good method is using the color channels, most likely the green channel as it is usually the smoothest (least grainy) to create a alpha (mask) channel out of.
Duplicating the green channel as an alpha channel and using levels, you can get something like this (rapid test):
From there you can paint in the full whites with brush or feathered lasso tool + fill, after which you can use the burn tool set to shadows at about 5% strength to fill in the blacks and the dodge tool set to highlights at about 5% strength to fill in the whites:
With the following result:
It’s a quick test so the background is not all clean but you get the basic idea. And you probably don’t actually want that much hair flying off.
-
Thank you so much, although I don’t think i will ever do it with as much precision as yourself, I will try to do what you did to my best standards 🙂
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up