How to Select Hair

Selecting Hair is about the hardest thing you can attempt to do in Photoshop. Each video shows an  increasingly more advanced technique to do this.

Part 1.

Demonstrates Select>Color Range, turning that into a mask, and then refining the edge. The results are simple to achieve, and pretty mediocre. It’s a starting place, but no more.

Part 2.

Demonstrates turning a channel into a mask, upping the contrast to make that a decent selection, and using the end result to get far better hair selection.

This is a method I use all the time for selections that seem impossibly hard.

Part 3.

Building on the previous tutorial, this shows how to refine the mask even further and work in and out of various points to make the selection seamless.

Part 4.

For those still not satisfied, this gets into incorporating color spill, and getting finer edges by playing around with color modes, and other techniques that I’ve learned more from my work experience in compositing and dealing with green screens, than from my experience as a photographer. For movies these techniques are essential. For still images, they add an extra layer of polish most don’t know is possible.