Expert: Glen Demers - 7/23/2010

Question
Hi Glen,

Thanks a lot for the info on composing an image it was really helpful again thank you.

There is another question that I seemed to have forgotten to ask you about composing an image, and that is I hope you can help me out with this one. Again I still work with Photoshop 7.

When you are composing a person and you get strands of their hair how would you get around this one getting strands and strands of their hair by removing the background? I would, well I know it is very difficult and I would paint around the strands of hair, but that would too be difficult cause you have to zoom in on the image and the pixels get blurry you mays well just have a picture taken of the person with a white background and take the image in Photoshop and make the image gif format remove the white background or transfer the image to a transparent background, but that is not always possible.

But I would still like to know how you would compose an image of a person with the strands of their hair and remove the background of the image of a person as I have said and asked before? As I have said I hope you can help me with this one. Thank you again, Glen.

Sincerely yours,

Martin C. Meyer

Answer
Hi Martin,

Windblown hair can be difficult to separate from the background, especially if the background is close in color to the hair.

Once you have outlined the person and most of their hair, I would make a rough selection of the stray strands and copy to a new layer. Using the eraser and magic wand tools, I would get rid of as much background as possible. Trying to isolate individual strands is pointless as the pixels are generally wider than the hairs and you get a choppy mess, better to just leave off the individual stray hairs.

A lot of times I will select the background color with the magic wand tool using a low tolerance setting of about 4 -20. Then select similar to get all the pixels of the color. I usually type the q to toggle quickly in and out of quickmask to check my selection. With the background selected go to Select>Modify>Expand and expand your selection 1 or 2 pixels. Then go to Select>Feather... and feather the selection the same amount, 1 or 2 pixels. Hit delete. This will create a soft transition between the hairs and the background.

Another trick I use on the hair layer is to go to Image>Adjustments>Selective Color. This way you can change the color of the pixels surrounding the hair from the old background to the new. If you had a blonde against a red background, you'd have pink transition pixels between the hair and background. This would tend to give you a pink halo around the hair no matter how close you outlined it. By using the Selective Color panel and taking Magenta out of the Reds would eliminate these color remnants.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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