I really enjoy retouching... but hair is my nemesis. I've made some good progress after reading some threads here and especially watching Natalia's video on cloning in darken mode, but I need some guidance on what to do in situations like this:
where I've got a section of hair that is just extremely messy. Am I doomed to spend hours cloning each piece away? Is there a better way? I feel like painting in a new section of hair would be better than trying to fix a mess like that, but I'm not the best digital painter and would really appreciate any tips, tutorials, vids, links, anything at all to help me with this.
Stephanie Mac wrote: I really enjoy retouching... but hair is my nemesis. I've made some good progress after reading some threads here and especially watching Natalia's video on cloning in darken mode, but I need some guidance on what to do in situations like this:
where I've got a section of hair that is just extremely messy. Am I doomed to spend hours cloning each piece away? Is there a better way? I feel like painting in a new section of hair would be better than trying to fix a mess like that, but I'm not the best digital painter and would really appreciate any tips, tutorials, vids, links, anything at all to help me with this.
I will be trolling this thread for any answers. I'm with you. This braid almost killed me...! I've been doing same thing....clone in dark mode. Sometimes i switch to spot heal if hair is going in same direction. Some times I add a little softness to the hard brush. I can't paint very well either and havent found any good tutorials. I would like to learn it for the very reason above....
Stephanie, you mentioned that you felt it would often be quicker to paint in a section of hair from scratch, and I agree with you. I think, in the long run, learning to paint hair is a great investment in time, and you shouldn't shy away from it because it's maybe intimidating at first. It's actually one of the easiest things to digitally paint convincingly. You can use the smudge tool or a brush on a separate layer which allows you to make flowing, gestural marks which can later be truncated with the eraser and adjusted in other ways. Using a jittery brush setting can also be useful. Natalia has demonstrated the smudge tool technique on video, and you might find viewing that useful. Here's an example of a problem section of hair, with the retouched area completely reconstructed (re-invented) using the techniques I've mentioned. It took about 3/4 hour.
I forgot to say that blurring the extra strands is an important part of the technique, and adding noise may also be necessary to create a convincing look.
It's in her retouching video. She uses the smudge tool to pick up colour with a very small brush size. Then she (if I remember correctly) goes Filter>Blur>Blur, Add Noise at about 1.5, then another Blur or Blur More.
AKMac wrote: Stephanie, you mentioned that you felt it would often be quicker to paint in a section of hair from scratch, and I agree with you. I think, in the long run, learning to paint hair is a great investment in time, and you shouldn't shy away from it because it's maybe intimidating at first. It's actually one of the easiest things to digitally paint convincingly. You can use the smudge tool or a brush on a separate layer which allows you to make flowing, gestural marks which can later be truncated with the eraser and adjusted in other ways. Using a jittery brush setting can also be useful. Natalia has demonstrated the smudge tool technique on video, and you might find viewing that useful. Here's an example of a problem section of hair, with the retouched area completely reconstructed (re-invented) using the techniques I've mentioned. It took about 3/4 hour.
So what are the steps to do this. Ive read things about clipped layers and such but havent been able to follow it. The tutorials I saw wasnt the look i was going for...it wasnt natural. But this is exactly what i'm looking to learn. I think it will save a lot of time for problems areas.
You can use the smudge tool and or a standard brush. You need to set it very small and hard, because you will blur it later. The smudge tool will pick up colour from adjacent areas, but that's not always what you want. So using the brush tool and Alt clicking to select colour can be more useful in certain circumstances. The basic technique is to draw the hair strands and then add a minimal blur, add noise and then blur again. I tend to fine tune the colour and tone later using the Hue Saturation Command from the main menu, rather than an adjustment layers, because it's more direct. Also using D&B to adjust local tone areas for shine etc is good. Work with fast sweeping strokes of the pen, from the elbow, starting and ending the strokes well beyond the target area. Then use a fairly hard eraser to cut off the excess if the newly painted strands need to emerge from under an existing edge, and a big soft eraser to blend out the painted strands into the existing hair. Using separate layers for underlying darker strands, a layer of strands on top of that, and the final, fully visible surface strands allows for later fine tuning of the tonal/colour relationships. I've recently been using a brush with some jitter which I like. It's still just a small, hard round brush. You can also work with pressure sensitivity.
It's really all about trial and error, but once you start to get the hang of it, it's surprisingly easy.
That's all.
AKMac wrote: You can use the smudge tool and or a standard brush. You need to set it very small and hard, because you will blur it later. The smudge tool will pick up colour from adjacent areas, but that's not always what you want. So using the brush tool and Alt clicking to select colour can be more useful in certain circumstances. The basic technique is to draw the hair strands and then add a minimal blur, add noise and then blur again. I tend to fine tune the colour and tone later using the Hue Saturation Command from the main menu, rather than an adjustment layers, because it's more direct. Also using D&B to adjust local tone areas for shine etc is good. Work with fast sweeping strokes of the pen, from the elbow, starting and ending the strokes well beyond the target area. Then use a fairly hard eraser to cut off the excess if the newly painted strands need to emerge from under an existing edge, and a big soft eraser to blend out the painted strands into the existing hair. Using separate layers for underlying darker strands, a layer of strands on top of that, and the final, fully visible surface strands allows for later fine tuning of the tonal/colour relationships. I've recently been using a brush with some jitter which I like. It's still just a small, hard round brush. You can also work with pressure sensitivity.
It's really all about trial and error, but once you start to get the hang of it, it's surprisingly easy.
That's all.
I think its the layers part that always confuses me. THe tutorials...even the good ones...always skip over that part. What kind of layer? A copy of the background? A blank layer?
nebulaoperator
Posts: 318
London, England, United Kingdom
It is great help from fellow retouchers and AKMac gives you most of fundamental and used techniques. I used Natalias tips on hair painting too and from other retouchers. I found my self using smudge tool, brush painting with fading set and recently discovered simply using clone tool on normal mode to paint hair.I also use darken and lighter mode with clone tool too. I hated a lot doing hair at the start and the bigest hell for me was to start learning painting them but the only way to perfect your skills is practice, try and error like AKMac suggested. After a while you will get hold of things and hair retouching will start flowing. It is still one of the most chalanging and time consuming things for me.
There's another skill I'm not good at nor have the patience for. Seriously though, that's a great result. I'll drink less coffee and give it a go. Cheers
SKITA Studios
Posts: 1,318
Boston, Massachusetts, US
AKMac wrote: I tend to fine tune the colour and tone later using the Hue Saturation Command from the main menu, rather than an adjustment layers, because it's more direct.
How do you get the colors to change realistically? Just dodge/burn various parts of it to match the lighting?
Redrawing it does sound a lot faster than fiddling w/ hiding all the little hairs...
How do you get the colors to change realistically? Just dodge/burn various parts of it to match the lighting?
Redrawing it does sound a lot faster than fiddling w/ hiding all the little hairs...
That's something you need to do by eye. Every situation is unique.
Strangekitty
Posts: 12,854
New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
AKMac wrote: Stephanie, you mentioned that you felt it would often be quicker to paint in a section of hair from scratch, and I agree with you. I think, in the long run, learning to paint hair is a great investment in time, and you shouldn't shy away from it because it's maybe intimidating at first. It's actually one of the easiest things to digitally paint convincingly. You can use the smudge tool or a brush on a separate layer which allows you to make flowing, gestural marks which can later be truncated with the eraser and adjusted in other ways. Using a jittery brush setting can also be useful. Natalia has demonstrated the smudge tool technique on video, and you might find viewing that useful. Here's an example of a problem section of hair, with the retouched area completely reconstructed (re-invented) using the techniques I've mentioned. It took about 3/4 hour.
I agree with this, and i've done it before. Sometimes it's goot to 'fake' it, but only if you think you can pull it off!
Great thread and advice! : ) Down the road though you will definitely get several hair samples to comp in (so learn to do that also) but nevertheless it's very important to know just in case. Particularly with the flyaways.
well if u dont want to paint hair then just smudge the flying hair away , i do it sometimes, when i have really little material to work with when cloning in darken and lighten mode.
OTTO poste1
Posts: 184
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
I worked on this photo and yes, the hair took me hours but I have to admit that I am not really efficient yet.
that's what I got :
I created a split frequency separation, so the color information and texture information would be separated. If you don't how to do this, here is how to :
- create two duplicates of your image.
One will be named LOW layer (the bottom copy) and the other HIGH layer (the top copy).
- blur the "low" layer with gaussian blur until all the flying hair are so blurred they are be visible anymore (this way, you know they will be on the "high"layer when you create it). (For this photo, it was quite a high radius, around 30 if I remember well. It really depends on the resolution of your photo).
Then, to create the "high" frequency layer.
- select the other layer that you named "high", use the Apply Image (Image>Apply Image on mac, dont know if it's the same for PC).
- In the "layer box", select the layer that is called "low",
- click the "Invert" box if your image is in 16bits, (leave it unchecked if your image is in 8bits).
- in the "blending" box choose "Add" for an image in 16bits (for an 8bits image, choose "substract")
- in the "Scale" box, choose a value of 2 for an image in 16 or 8 bits.
- in the "Offset" box, leave the value at 0 for a 16bits image (or 128 for an 8 bits image)
- Click OK
now your high layer is gray with only the texture information remaining.
- in your layers palette choose the "linear light" blending mode.
Your image should look exactly like your original, only the color information ("low" layer) and the texture information ("high"layer) are separated onto two different layers.
You can then start cloning the hair on the "high layer" with the Clone tool, set on "Current Layer" in "normal mode"in the tool's options.
This helps quite a bit to clone out not only the flying hair, but zits on skin etc.. only cloning the texture and not the color information.
Sounds like a handful, but it's quite fast to do once you get the hang of it.
Once I cloned out all the flying hair (yes.. it took quiiiite a while), I had to redraw some parts of the braid that had lost too much texture information. There wasn't too much to draw, which is good if you are not too used to draw hair, and the hair strands are quite short so it's good for training.
For this, I created an empty layer and drew with a brush I created, picking different colors of the original hair. (because I always forget about the Smudge tool technic )
Hair strands are never totally smooth, so I added a jitter with a dual brush in the brush options panel.
Once you have drawn the strands, as the others say, blur so it looks natural and add some noise to match the noise of the rest of the hair/photo so it blends in perfectly, dodge and burn and there you go.
Agnese Lupike wrote: well if u dont want to paint hair then just smudge the flying hair away , i do it sometimes, when i have really little material to work with when cloning in darken and lighten mode.
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