CUT OUT HAIR IN PHOTOSHOP CC TUTORIAL, SELECT AND MASK

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

Cut Out Hair in Photoshop CC Tutorial, Select and MaskHey, Colin here from PhotoshopCAFE and I'm really excited about this next tutorial.  This is looking at the selection and the masking space, which is brand new inside of PhotoshopCC 2015. 5. So one of my favorite features, and I know one of yours as well, is using the SelectionBrush and Refine Edge, so all of that is now being changed.  It's actually a lot better,it's easier to make selections, and you can get better selections and better edges on those selections.  It's great for things like cutting out hair and difficult objects like that.  So, anyway, check out this tutorial.  I know you're going to love it. All right, here we have a woman that we're going to extract from the background.  Now,this is not necessarily an easy image even though it's a solid color in the background. If you'll look at the hair, we've got curly hair, and we've got a lot of individual flyaway hairs.  And I selected this image on purpose for this reason because one of the things that we've always kind of struggled with is getting good hair selections, you know, when we use the Quick Select and Refine Edge, it cut things out really well, but it always left a little bit of a glow or a halo around the edges of the hair and made it really hard to composite without doing a lot of work. So let's have a look at how we can do it now in the updated Selections and Masks inside of Photoshop CC 2015. 5.  So what we're going to do is grab the Quick Select Tool.  Now,we could go ahead and we can make the selection like we always do, and then, go up into Selected Mask instead of the Refine Edge.  But let's have a look at Select and Mask first, because one of the new things in here is we have a thing called the Onion Skin.  And if you 'd look under the Preview, here, the O key will get you to Onion Skin.  And what this does is enables us to show the full image or it can show us what's been extracted, obviously,nothing has been done yet, so there's been no selection. So what happens is you can set the transparency level to where you want, grab the Quick Select right here, and as you begin to paint, and as you paint, it will start to make the selections around these areas.  Now, one of the things I do, it does it pretty quick but notice how it's kind of compute what's going on here, so it takes a couple of seconds.  So one of the other things you could do is you could start by using the Quick Selection, and then,just come in here at this point, but here we go, I mean, we're not going too bad.  Sothis is a very high resolution image, which is why it's taking a little bit of time.  So far, this looks pretty good, but let's have a look.  If we pull the transparency down,we can see, yeah, we got our selection.  It's not bad, but the edges of the hair are looking pretty rough and there's little bits of the background there in-between the individual hairs, so we want to clean that up. We also want to make sure that we haven't left any areas out there, so if we hit Thek key, the K will actually bring us into the black and white view here.  And the black and white really shows the mask, so we can see there's no area left out in the middle.  That good, but let's also have a look at it against black.  Notice our background's looking weird and that's because of the Opacity.  If we turn that Opacity all the way up, we can see there's black background.  So what we can do is we're going to go down to the next one, which is our Refine Brush, and now we're just going to paint inside these little areas in here where we can see these hairs or the background is showing through the hairs.  We just want to get rid of that.  So I'm just quickly painting over those areas, and what it's doing is its letting Photoshop know, hey, these colors don't belong in here; these belong in the background, so it's helping it make an extraction.  And even as I refine it here, you'll notice it will change on the other side because it's using that intelligence for the entire mask. All right, so we've kind of done that.  Let's hit the K key again and have a look at the mask, so you can see now that this mask is looking a lot better, and we can even go in here and start to refine it.  So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go back to the OnionSkin, so that's the O key.  You don't have to remember these keyboard shortcuts.  You can just go under the View, and under the View here, you can see the keyboard shortcuts right next to them.  So I'm going to take this transparency down a little bit because I want to see where some of those fly away hairs are appearing, but not on the selection.  So,now, I'm going to go over these flyaway hairs and just kind of paint over them and include them in the selection.  And as we do this, Photoshop is going to grab those, see that?And start to add it to our selection.  So I'm going to go over here, there's some there. Just make sure we get them all, and getting closer, let's go up here, and we just want to follow that whole outline, and just make sure that we are indeed going over all the hairs, selecting them all. All right, so now let's have a look.  We can bring this transparency back a little bit and see how well we're doing.  That's looking really good.  Notice we've got most of the hair.  There are a couple of things you could play around with.  If you wanted, you could go up to the Radius and, maybe, add one to the Radius.  And sometimes that will clean it up and just get a little bit more and it actually looks quite good by doing that.  That worked well.  You can show the edge just by clicking up here, like we did in the past,but we don't really need to do that.  And then, the other thing that really works really well the Decontaminate Colors.  So if I go against the blackólet me show you hereóso we select against the black and see how these colors have got just, you know, there's a little bit of weird color, but once we hit Decontaminate Colors, look at that, cleans it up.  It might look like those are not selected, but if we put this against white, notice that those edges where those hairs are indeed selected.  And, of course, you know, we can always just go through and refine it a little bit more if we want when we're looking at that, and that will refine it even more.  So there we go, see how we're picking up some of those loose hairs in there now.  All right, that's looking pretty good. So what I want to do now is go to a new layer with the Layer Mask and click OK, and there'sour extraction.  Notice that the individual hairs are in there, and let's see how good this looks against another background.  So I'm just going to select this here and we 're just going to click and drag it into another image, let's release it, and we can see that we're able to, you know, start to do some compositing there, and that's using the Select and Mask workspace.  You can see how much better we can get these selections, and how quickly,and easily we can do that right here.  So, as you can see, you know, one of the most important features in Photoshop has received a major update and you got it right here. You can see how to use it now, so check out PhotoshopCAFE for a ton more tutorials.  If you enjoyed this tutorial, please become part of the CAFE crew, hit that Subscribe button right now, become a subscriber, and I'll get new tutorials to you every single week. So, thanks for watching guys.  Add a comment, add a Like, and until next time, I'll see you at the CAFE.