The fourth installment of my Photoshop photo retouching series concerns making your hair look more glossy and beautiful with Photoshop. The earlier installments have already made me look like I have bigger eyes, clearer skin, and an evenly colored complexion, but why stop there? Why not keep going until I look like Angelina Jolie?
Above is the photograph after the first three retouching techniques. The skin looks noticeably better, but there’s got to be something we can do about that hair. First, let’s open the image in Photoshop and make sure it’s flattened into one layer (Layer –> Flatten Image) from the last time we were editing it. After that, duplicate the layer (Layer –> Duplicate Layer.
Now we’re going to add some color depth and lighting contrast to my hair. First, we have to select the parts we want to adjust, which in this case is just my hair. I’m going to use a combination of the Magic Wand Tool and the Magnetic Lasso Tool to select a rough outline of my hair.
Now that we’ve got my hair selected, we’ll create a new layer via copy (Layer –> New –> Layer Via Copy)
Now we’ll add a Curves Adjustment Layer to that layer that just contains the part we’ve isolated. With that layer selected, go to Layer –> Adjustment Layer –> Curves. A dialog will come up that asks you to name the layer (but you don’t have to) and it will have a check box that says “use previous layer to create clipping mask.” Check the box.
Now we need to make some adjustments to the curves when the dialog appears. I’m going to use one of the Presets, and set it to medium contrast. You can play around to see what works best for your photograph. Depending upon the hair color in the photo, you might want to use more or less contrast, or even experiment with changing the curves by hand.
Now, as usual, this will look a little bit fake at first. So let’s drop the opacity down a bit to get it looking more natural. Check out the header pic to compare before and after; the effect is very subtle, but in the second picture the hair is glossier and less dull. With a picture featuring longer hair (or hair worn down), the effect will be more dramatic.
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