Subscribe: RSS or e-mail

Changing Hair Color Using Photoshop

Find out how you could select and change hair color using Photoshop either to a natural or a fancy color, it's your choice.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Duplicate the Background layer by dragging and dropping it on the new layer icon located at the bottom of the Layers window.
3. Rename the new layer to "Hair".
   
4. Select the Hair layer and click Filter > Extract (Alt+Ctrl+X).
5. Now use the Edge Highlighter Tool (B) to highlight the edges of the hair, what I want to mention here is that you may overlap the hair and background areas with highlighting, this is the beauty of the Photoshop Extract Tool, it detected the difference between the selection and the background areas and that's why it's almost a prefect tool for hair selection.
6. You can use the Eraser Tool (E) to erase any wrong highlighting and you can also modify the Highlighter size from the Brush Size located at the right of the Photoshop Extract Tool window.
7. After finishing your selection, choose the Fill Tool (G) and fill the hair inside your highlighting area.
   
8. Click the Preview button to preview your work, you can choose the Highlighter Tool or the Eraser Tool again to modify your work if you need to.
9. Click the Ok button, now you should have two layers, the Background layer and the Hair layer.
10. Make sure the Hair layer is selected and click Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation or simply press (Ctrl+U).
11. Check Colorize and play with the sliders until you get the color that you like either a natural or a fancy color, it's your choice.
    
12. Click the Eyedropper too (I) and click any dark area of the hair.
13. Choose the Brush Tool (B), change Mode from Normal to Color, the Opacity to 50% and the Hardness of the brush to 27% (from the top tool bar in Photoshop).
14. Now colorize the brows to match the new hair color.