Photoshop Compositing Secrets - Matt Kloskowski [12]
STEP SEVEN:
Now, continue to brush around the edges of the hair to bring all of the wispy hair edges back. You can paint in one long brush stroke around the entire head, or use smaller strokes in more concentrated areas. Honestly, I’ve tried both and I haven’t noticed better (or worse) results from either way.
STEP EIGHT:
Every once in a while, you’ll use the Refine Radius tool and paint over an area that you didn’t want to paint over. You may notice it immediately, but sometimes it’s hard to spot. Either way, it’s always good to press the K key to set the View mode of Refine Edge to the On Black & White view, where you can see missed areas more clearly. Here, you can immediately see that we’re missing part of her jacket on the right where her shoulder meets her hair. So, press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and paint over that area to bring it back.
STEP NINE:
The selection is looking good now. So, just choose Layer Mask from the Output To pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog, and click OK. Now, we have our subject selected from the background, with a layer mask.
STEP 10:
Open a background image to place the subject on. In this case, I’m using something that has a lot of bright natural light in it, since our subject has light on both sides of her hair and I think a bright background fits her best. Once the background is open, switch back to the photo of the subject, select the Move tool from the Toolbox (just press V), and then drag the photo of the subject onto the new background and position her on the right. If your subject is larger than the new background, press Command-T (Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform, press-and-hold the Shift key, and then click-and-drag a corner handle inward to resize (press Command-0 [Zero;PC: Ctrl-0] if you can’t see the corner handles). Press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation. Note: If you had to resize your subject to fit in the new background, you may see an outline of your layer mask. Just use a black brush to paint this away on the layer mask.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/EVIRGEN
STEP 11:
Things are looking pretty good. We’ve selected our subject and we have lots of hair detail selected along with her. But if you zoom in and really look closely at the edges, you’ll see we have a problem: there’s some gray left over from the original background. In the next tutorial, we’ll look at how to fix this.
Refining Hair
We’re seeing a problem with the image in the previous tutorial because we placed our subject on a bright background. If you recall, in the Refine Edge dialog, we were previewing the selection on a black background, so we didn’t see the original background coming through at all. That just goes to show that the background plays a big role in compositing. If we were keeping her on a dark background, we’d be fine and I wouldn’t bother with the edges. But, since that’s not the case, let’s take a look at several ways to refine the hair edges even more using the composite we created in the last tutorial.
Method #1: Inner Glow Layer Style
STEP ONE:
The first method is one of my favorites and has become my go-to technique for refining hair edges. Click on the Add a Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Inner Glow.
STEP TWO:
When the Layer Style dialog opens, click on the color swatch near the top of the dialog to open the Color Picker. With the Eyedropper, click on an area in the hair that is closest to the overall hair color around it (don’t click on any dark roots or shadows) and then click OK to close the Color Picker. This sets the color of the glow.
STEP THREE:
Depending on how far the gray background encroaches on the hair, adjust the Size setting