Selecting Hair Tutorial???

I have a situation!

I can not find a tutorial that addresses my problem.

I have a picture of a girl. I need to change her hair color from neon orange to a more “client friendly” brown.

I am using Mac OS9 & PS 6

Problem #1. Selecting the hair.
The girl has very fine wispy hair. I “think” I should use the Magic Wand to select the majority of her hair. Then switch to Quick Mask mode and use small brushes to select the fine hairs. Is there a better or less time consuming way to select the fine wispy hairs?

Problem #2. Changing hair color.
Should I “Desaturate” the hair selection so that I am starting from a clean slate and then change the hair to a brown color or just go straight from neon orange to brown. Should I use “Hue & Saturation” with the “Colorize” button checked to change the hair color or is there a better way?

Thanks
John

1. Selecting the hair will be a time consuming task, and there's no single way to do it. Depends on the background, lighting, and other factors. An application like Knockout would probably help, but even that has limitations. Sounds like you're on the right track. If it helps in your case, check each of the channels to see if the contrast is good enough in any of the channels to help you select with the wand tool. Typically you'd need to feather your selection edges slightly, but that can be done selectively with the blur tool on your layer mask.

2. There are probably about as many methods of changing the color as there are users, so my method may not be the easiest or best suggestion. Create a layer over the top, and fill your selected hair area with a shade of brown that seems close to your final color. Set the opacity method to Color. Then use the selection, and adjust the channels (on the original image) until you get the color you want.

For more precise results I paste a sample of the correct color into its own layer above the original image. Then I adjust levels on each of the channels in the image layer to match that color, one at a time. Working visually, when you have a channel selected (so the image looks b/w) adjust the levels in the image layer until the color sample seems to virtually disappear in relation.

Have a look at the tutorial entitled "Selecting hair by channels" at the following link:

<http://www.planetphotoshop.com/peteback.html>

Ian