On this video tutorial photographer Nathaniel Dodson (from the website tutvid) demonstrates what he sees as the most effective way to select and cut out hair using Photoshop CC.
Hair was and still is the most challenging part to select out of a background. While AI is already pretty good at general selections – we have yet to see perfect AI selections of hair (although when these arrive as part of Photoshop they are going to save lots of users TONS of time).
At the moment we are still looking at what is basically a manual task and Dodson starts with the Quick Selection tool and make a rough selection and then goes to the Select & Mask to clean the edges up a bit, build back missing a piece of the image. Next, he outputs a mask and drags the result to a new image.
The final step is to use a Brush tool with a Soft Light adjustment to help us manually defringe the edges of the hair.
This, of course, isn’t the first time we look into advanced hair selections in Photoshop. We have looked at how to make fine hair selections many times in the past on several different videos aimed at different levels of photographers/image editors – including “How to Cut Out Complex Hair in Photoshop” with Aaron Nace and more recently “How to Cut Out Hair in Photoshop with the Brush Tool“, Photoshop senior product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes had a very nice simple guide for beginners entitled “How to Make Fine Hair Selections in Photoshop” while both Jesús Ramirez with “Advanced Hair Selection Tutorial – Masking Hair In Photoshop” and Michael Woloszynowicz with “How To Quickly Remove Stray Hairs in Photoshop” had some more in-depth guides.
You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can also check Dodson’s previous videos here on LensVid.