Color your model’s hair many different shades — without the chemicals

Design, Media & Graphics

Sometimes when creating an advertisement or marketing piece, you’ll need to convey a certain image. But does your model really want to dye her hair purple just for your photo shoot? Whether you’d like to complement your model’s skin tone, go with a funky ‘do, or simply darken those locks, there’s a simple approach to colorizing hair in Photoshop — and it doesn’t require a trip to the hairdresser.

Make a selection

We’ll start by selecting the hair on our model shown in Figure A. You can do this any way that works best for you, but we’ll make a Quick Mask selection.

To make a Quick Mask selection:

1. Double-click on the Edit In Quick Mask Mode button located at the base of the Tools palette to display the Quick Mask Options dialog box.
2. Select the Selected Areas option button and set the opacity to your liking. We set ours to 50 %, as shown in Figure B.
3. Click OK.
4. Select the Brush tool from the Tools palette, choose a soft round brush, and set the diameter to whatever size you’re comfortable painting over the hair with.
5. Paint over the hair.
6. Press Q to exit Quick Mask Mode and preview your selection, as shown in Figure C.

Tip: Save this selection as a channel in case you accidentally deselect it. Simply click the Save Selection As Channel button located at the base of the Channels palette.

Choose your dye

Now that you have an active selection, you can easily add a fill color and, with a quick blending mode switch, colorize the model’s hair any way you like.

To colorize the hair:

1. Click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer button located at the base of the Layers palette.
2. Select Color Fill from the pop-up menu to display the Color Fill dialog box. The color fill layer automatically masks around your selection so only the hair shape is colorized.
3. Set the color to R:149, G:51, B:4 for a reddish brown dye, as shown in Figure D, and click OK.
4. Set the layer opacity to Soft Light for results shown in Figure E.

Notice two things as you select colors. You can watch your model’s hair change colors as you choose different colors. You can also sample a color from your model by moving the mouse over your image and clicking on an area where the cursor displays as an eyedropper.


Clean up the edges

When we zoomed in to our model’s shoulders and face, we noticed the imperfections from the selection we made. We spotted hair color on the face and shoulder! That’s easy to fix.

To remove unwanted color:

1. Select the Color Fill layer’s mask thumbnail in the Layers palette.
2. Select a soft round brush and set the diameter small enough to paint on these areas.
3. Set the foreground color to black.
4. Paint over the areas that display fill color but shouldn’t.

Change the color

Don’t like the color you selected? It’s easy to change. Simply double-click the Color Fill layer thumbnail to open the Color Picker and select a different color. Figure F shows different RGB values and how they affect the model’s hair. So whether you’re going for punk or subdued, you can really spruce up your subject’s mane with this technique!


Related Courses

• Photoshop CS3 - Level 2
• Photoshop CS3 Photo Printing and Color
• Photoshop CS4 - Level 2

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