In this tutorial, you will learn How to Select & Mask Hair in Photoshop.

In this tutorial, we’ll be addressing the technique to cut out hair in particular. While selecting a subject can be tricky on its own, semi-transparent hair is where it becomes really difficult.

To get started, we’ve already have a cut out of our subject with very crude cutout of the hair as well.

Let’s take a look at our main strategy to select hair. We’re going to use select and mask and refine edge tool. Duplicate our layer. Let’s click on our layer mask and Go to Select - Select and Mask. Set it to overlay view which will be the most helpful in our opinion.

On the left hand side, select refine and mask tool. This tool does the following: whenever you click on something, it’ll sample that texture and color and the more you go, the more it looks for that texture and color, masking out everything else.

So let’s start by clicking on the hair and while holding it, move the cursor to the outside over the part of the hair that is transparent. When done, we should have a result that mostly looks great. Make sure you’re outputting this to the layer mask and click ok. This will update the layer mask.

Holding Option, click on the layer mask. If we’re not happy with the results just yet, here’s what we can do. Select the brush tool, and change the mode of the brush tool to Overlay. Now if you paint with the brush, instead of filling it in with solid white or black, it’ll protect the lighter areas but darken up the feathery bits. Now holding Option click on the layer mask again to go to the normal view and see what we’ve done!

This is the general strategy that works 99% of the time when you’re dealing with tricky hair selection. While it may require some manual input, we feel like most of the process is somewhat automated!

What other Photoshop tutorials would you like us to make? Please let us know in the comments.

#HowTech #Photoshop
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