Help in Editing Photo With Curly Hair Strands

JL
Posted By
Jehzeel_Laurente
Mar 14, 2007
Views
1349
Replies
6
Status
Closed
I need help of how to edit a photo with curly hair strands. I tried the pen tool, but it’s very hard to let the hair strand be as it is. I tried the Magic Wand and Magic Eraser tool, but it won’t help. Is there any other way to crop this photo, leaving the background transparent, and leaving the hair as it is with a transparent background.

This is the link to the image: <http://dostscholars.com/images/curlyhair.jpg>

Thank you so much in advance, any help with be greatly appreciated… 🙂
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edit hair help

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B
Bernie
Mar 14, 2007
Check this thread out:

< http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.1de5f905.3bb80e5d/7 ?14@@>
C
chrisjbirchall
Mar 14, 2007
Sometimes you have to use a combination of tools.

For this I took the Background eraser set to 40% tolerance and "wiped" it around the hair in one sweep.

Ten I put the image into the "Extract" filter to extract the rest of the image from the background. Then a little cleaning up with the normal eraser.

Because the background eraser cannot completely eliminate the background between the whisps, due to the "gritty" texture of the background in this shot, you have to resort to some trickery:

After inserting the new BG, I sampled the blue colour, then "Locked Transparency" on the image layer. Using the brush tool at 50% I then "painted" any remaining bits of which(ish) colour finging the hair, with blue sampled from the background.

Obviously, a much better job could be done when working on the full resolution file.

Experiment with those tools, and always work on a copy so you can go back and try again if things go wrong.

Chris.
A
a
Mar 14, 2007
Extract is about the only Photoshop tool that will help you with that, even then it will be hard.

wrote in message
I need help of how to edit a photo with curly hair strands. I tried the pen tool, but it’s very hard to let the hair strand be as it is. I tried the Magic Wand and Magic Eraser tool, but it won’t help. Is there any other way to crop this photo, leaving the background transparent, and leaving the hair as it is with a transparent background.

This is the link to the image:
<http://dostscholars.com/images/curlyhair.jpg>

Thank you so much in advance, any help with be greatly appreciated… 🙂
EH
Ed_Hannigan
Mar 14, 2007
Look at the Channels. The Red one might be good to Duplicate, then using Levels get as much contrast as possible without losing detail. You can work on this and use it to make a Layer Mask.
JL
Jehzeel_Laurente
Mar 14, 2007
WOW what a clever move!!!! It was really helpful, il try it out. Thanks guys! 🙂
J
Joel
Mar 14, 2007
wrote:

I need help of how to edit a photo with curly hair strands. I tried the pen tool, but it’s very hard to let the hair strand be as it is. I tried the Magic Wand and Magic Eraser tool, but it won’t help. Is there any other way to crop this photo, leaving the background transparent, and leaving the hair as it is with a transparent background.

This is the link to the image: <http://dostscholars.com/images/curlyhair.jpg>
Thank you so much in advance, any help with be greatly appreciated… 🙂

You don’t wanna use neither Pen tool, Magic Wand, Magic Eraser etc. but you should learn Masking. Or if you do lot of flying hair then you may want to invest in some plug-in (can be pretty expensive or between $150-200+ a pop, and you may need more than one) <bg>

Below is the sample

http://img232.imageshack.us/my.php?image=curlyhair2ql6.jpg

and the MASK

http://img70.imageshack.us/my.php?image=curlyhair2maskkd8.jp g

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