If you have a photo of someone and you want to change their hair color it’s pretty easy to do with a quick mask. So first of all what you need to do is you need to select a brush for your quick mask. So click on your brush tool from your toolbox and then go up and choose whatever size of brush you think is going to be best for the size of photo that you’re working with. I’m going to go ahead and choose a27 and then you are going to want to enter quick mask mode and choose a soft brush too. Make sure it’s a soft one.
So to do that, click on the Q on your keyboard and then you may need to zoom up on your picture and you’re simply just going to cover the picture with the quick mask which is this red color here. And this is going to allow you to change the hair color. If you need to, go ahead and choose a larger brush, and you want to get it right but if you don’t get it exactly right, we’re going to use the eraser tool at the end of this tutorial to go back and fix any mistakes that we’ve made. So you can certainly go rough at first and then clean up at the end or you could be more precise with this part so you don’t have so much clean up at the end.
And so go ahead and just keep selecting here. Again, when you’re finished, press the Q button on your keyboard again and it’s going to go ahead and select the hair. To get a better selection of this, go up to select and then go to inverse and you’re going to get a tighter selection of that hair. So now you are ready to change the color. So first of all, you want to create a new layer on the layer palette and on this layer you want to change the blending so that you have a soft light and this is going to create, since the hair is soft, this is going to give you a better result.
You then want to choose the color of your hair. Click on your color well and you could choose whatever color that you want. You could choose a crazy color or you can use the eyedropper tool to select a color that’s closer to the person’s natural color and then you can move it from there. Click on the okay button. And you’ve got your brush tool, you could change the brush—if you want you could change the brush size and style. I’m going to go ahead and try with this one and I’m going to just go over the hair and you could see how it has changed that to a different color getting more reddish tone. And you could do this quick because it’s only going to go inside your selection. Now we’ve given this person red hair.
Now, when you are ready to touch up, go to your erase tool, choose the eraser tool. Again, I would do a soft brush, you’re going to want to go smaller this time and most actually deselect the hair by CTRL D. And then with our eraser we can go over here and the parts that we got red on such as the side of the face or the ear, we can go ahead and touch that up. You may want to do the scalp a little bit and that will take away the red that has went somewhere that you don’t want it.
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