Hair has always been tough to extract from an image, but with the Extract feature in Adobe® Photoshop® and the secrets I’ll show you in this tip, you’ll be extracting hair with ease. In this project, I’ve opened an image with two layers, one being the background image, and the other the image from which I’m going to extract the hair so that the background shows through. Let’s get started…
1. In Photoshop, choose Filter> Extract to load the hair image into the Extract window.
2. Select the edge highlighter tool and paint around the edges of the hair. It does not matter how far you paint into the background, but don’t paint too far into the image. Do be sure to paint over any areas that are in transition between the background and the hair. You may need to zoom in
to see all of these. And don’t overlook areas such as the space between the woman’s arms.
Edge Highlighter The edge highlighter tool marks the areas of transition. You don’t want to paint too far into your image or the algorithms that figure out the transition will not work correctly. Should you paint too far into the image, it’s easy to fix. While using the edge highlighter tool, press the Option/Alt key to access the eraser tool, and just erase the extra highlighted area.
3. Once all the transition areas of the image are highlighted, select the paint bucket tool. Position it within the portion of the image that you want to maintain. Click once to fill the area. This fill protects that area.
Tool Options To see your highlight and fill colors better, you can change those colors within the Extract window, under the Tool Options. Here you can also change your brush size and turn on Smart Highlighting.
4. Click Preview, and in a matter of seconds the results appear. Unbelievable! The hair is transitioning to transparency. Absolutely amazing. But wait, there’s more.
5. Click OK, and let’s finish our project. Now that we have this transparency, we can turn on our background image, and lo and behold: the two images blend together seamlessly.
Written by: Russel Preston Brown
For more tutorial, you can visit photoshop extract hair ebook here.
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