Retouching Hair: Fixing Gaps

If you’re following our series, you’ve already learned some important techniques. Now, Scott Kelby shows you how to fix gaps in hair strands using patching, blending, smoothing and masking techniques …

Scott Kelby shows you how to add highlights, remove strands, fix gaps, change color, darken a part line, and hide roots when retouching hair in Photoshop. In this episode, Scott shows you how to fix fly-away hair, stray strands of hair, and the “frizzies”.

Scott Kelby photo retouchingScott writes:

Retouching hair is one of the trickiest retouches

quoting Retouching hair is one of the trickiest retouches, because the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool usually give you pretty lame results. So, you usually have to move hair from one place to another to cover the problem, and this is one of the situations where you need to do just that—covering a gap in the hair caused by your subject’s position, or movement, or a fan, or one of the dozen things that cause a gap to appear temporarily and mess up your shot. Here’s the best way I found to fix it . . .
end quote

Step One: Here’s the image we want to retouch, and you can see the gaps in her hair, just above her shoulders. Again, using the Clone Stamp tool or Healing Brush tool here would be a nightmare (and a dead giveaway), so instead, we’re going to pick up chunks of nearby hair and use them to cover the gaps.

feather your lasso selection

Step Two: Get the Lasso tool (L) and draw a selection over a chunk of hair that’s near the gap you need to remove (as shown here, where I’ve selected an area just to the right of the gap on the left). You’re going to need to soften the edge of this selection, so it blends in when we move it over the gap. So, go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, enter 4 pixels and click OK. By the way, 4 pixels isn’t a magical number—it’s just my starting place. The higher the number, the softer (and more transparent) the edges will be, so if they seem too soft, try 3, or even 2.

Command J copies to a new layer

Step Three: Now, press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to place that chunk up on its own separate layer. Switch to the Move tool (V) and move that chunk layer over to the left until it covers the gap. Now, although it does sometimes happen, more often than not, it’s not going to cover the gap perfectly and just blend right in with the hair around it. So, in the next step, you’re going to have to tweak it, but don’t feel like you made a bad selection—you nearly always have to transform the copied hair chunk a bit to make it work.

NEXT: Let’s manipulate these selections to fit the hair perfectly

Step Four: Using selection “patches” to fill gaps

Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform, so you can rotate the chunk clockwise to match up with the existing hair around it better (below, left). Just move your cursor outside the Free Transform bounding box, and your cursor changes into a two-headed arrow (seen here). Now, just click-and-drag in a small circular motion to your right and the chunk rotates. Once it’s rotated, you may have to move your cursor inside the bounding box to reposition the chunk a little to make the hair match up better. Granted, it’s not perfect, but that’s okay—we still have more tweaking to do.

rotate the selection to match

Step Five: Press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your Free Transform rotation. You can kind of see an edge area on the right side of the chunk that isn’t quite blending very well, so we’re going to mask that away in just a couple of brush strokes. Click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a layer mask to this layer. Now, get the Brush tool (B), press X to set your Foreground color to black (because your layer mask is white), set your brush Opacity to 100%, and choose a small, soft-edged brush. Paint a few small strokes over the top of the chunk to help blend that part in with the surrounding hair. (above, right)

Eyedropper tool to sample darker areas

Step Six: Here’s the additional step I now add that makes a difference in the depth of the retouch: Take the Eyedropper tool and sample a darker area of her hair. Then, with the Brush tool, with the Opacity lowered to around 15%, so it’s very subtle, paint a few strokes over the darker areas within the areas you just lightened a moment ago (as shown here). Just paint a few strokes here and there to give it some dimension—this little step helps to make it look more natural and realistic.

Step Seven: In this case, it looks like we covered most of that bright spot, but there’s still a small bright area beneath our last fix. So, press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate that last fix, then use the Move tool to drag it down a little, add a layer mask, and paint some of the edges away to make it blend better.

add a new layer mask and begin painting

Step Eight: Use the same process to fill in a little more on the left side. After you get some of it filled in, you may want to press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to create a merged layer, then make your selection from it. When you’re done with the left side, move over to the right side and fill those gaps, too.

Now, we got lucky with this one, that all it took was a little rotation to get these chunks pretty close to where all we had to do was a little masking. Sometimes, you’ll have to actually flip the hair horizontally, so it doesn’t look like a copy of hair sitting beside itself (a dead giveaway). If that’s the case, once you bring up Free Transform, just Right-click inside the bounding box and when the menu appears, choose Flip Horizontal. Then you’ll have to rotate it back into place, but this little horizontal flip can really help hide that fact that you “borrowed” hair from a nearby area.

Here is the before and after shot
Click to view larger image

GO Continue with the next segment “Changing Hair Color

This is fairly common, especially if you’re working with an art director who wants the model’s hair to match the clothes, but luckily, most of the time, a change of hair color is fairly subtle, and not from one extreme to another.


Excerpted from : Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques by Scott Kelby

Excerpted from Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers
Using Photoshop by Scott Kelby. Copyright ©2011. Used with permission of
Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.


Peachpit / New Riders / Kelby Media

Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques / Amazon

Scott KelbyScott Kelby is Editor, Publisher, and co-founder of Photoshop User magazine, host of the top-rated weekly videocast Photoshop User TV, and co-host of D-Town TV (the weekly videocast for DSLR shooters). He is President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), the trade association for Adobe Photoshop users, and he¹s President of the training, education, and publishing firm, Kelby Media Group, Inc.