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Painting hair in Photoshop A note before you continue: you can't use a mouse... you need a pressure-sensitive pen tablet for this exercise. |
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| Let's begin! In figure one you can see the figure as I've prepared in Photoshop, and she's now ready for hair.. Made with Poser and rendered bald in Bryce, I've separated the figure from the background (by making a mask render in Bryce and using an alpha channel) to smooth out the crinkles in the skin and change the skin hue slightly.
The neck may not look quite right (an inherent problem in Poser). Don't be worried, we're going to cover up some of the problem with her hair. To get the resolution you need for this, I suggest a picture size at least one and a quarter times your screen size. |
figure 1 |
| Create a new layer (set to normal) above the body called 'base hair' (or something similar). Choose the paintbrush tool. Set the opacity of the brush to 100 and check only the box for size so the brush will recognize the pressure you put on the pen..
Next, begin painting the places you know the hair will be solid. You don't have to be precise... most of the work is still to come. The result so far is seen in figure 2. |
figure 2 |
| Now go to the smudge tool, use the second or third smallest brush (depending on the size of the picture) and set the opacity to 100, and check both boxes for opacity and size for the pen sensitivity. Then (very important): set the smudge mode to 'darken' in the drop-down menu. Otherwise you will get a white fringe around your brush strokes as you pull the hair out into transparent areas.
Begin pulling the hair around in broad sweeps. Never forget what your figure is doing and make sure the hair reflects the same action of the body. If you're left-handed like me, keep your right hand near CTL-Z for undo or press 'E' now and then to erase, then 'R' to go back to smudge. Practice makes perfect. It may take a while, but you'll get it. Figure 3 shows the process underway.
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figure 3 |
| To get the result in figure 4, you will sometime during the process switch to a smaller brush (eventually even the smallest one). To paint hair that goes behind the head, just keep with your sweeping strokes and don't care if they go in front of the body. You can always cut and paste the head in between the hair in front and the hair in back. It's another good reason I start a Photoshop/Poser session with cutting a good path around the body and pasting it in another layer. Later, I'm always glad I did.
A special note for the hairline: Set the mode on the smudge tool to 'normal' and check the box to 'use all layers' and go back and forth to get that soft look of where the skin meets the hair. Spend some time. The hairline can make or break the believability of your picture. Figure 4 is the finished black hair. But we're not done yet. |
figure 4 |
| In figure 5, you can see the highlights. I've painted them almost the same way as the black hair. Create another layer above the black hair called 'highlights'. Once again, use the paintbrush to paint a general (much smaller) white areas, then use the smudge tool (set to darken) to move the white around.
Then you can check the box to 'use all layers', change the smudge tool mode to 'normal' and push black back into the white areas until you get the look you want. When you're done, you can set the layer options to either 'normal' or 'lighten' for slightly different results. Depending on how strong the lighting is, I will adjust the opacity too. Generally I wait until after the next step until I decide. |
figure 5 |
Have you ever noticed that black hair always has a bluish tinge to it on the edges of the highlights? Take your highlight layer, duplicate it, call it 'blue tinge' and place it above the white highlight layer. Go to your main menu bar, and choose adjust: hue/saturation. When the palette appears, click the box to 'colorize'. Lower the lightness, raise the saturation, and move the slider until you find the color you want. Then click 'OK'. Go to your layer options and choose 'overlay'. Now lower the opacity until you're satisfied. Here's where you may want to go back and adjust the opacity of the white highlight layer until you get the results you want. Figure 6 shows the finished hair. I raised the opacity of the 'blue tinge' layer for demonstration purposes. The actual level I used was much less. |
figure 6 |
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And this is the picture I used the hair in. It's called "Pipeline!". Click here for the larger version. Good luck! For comments or questions you can always send mail to me.
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