Hair Masking question

LH
Posted By
Linda_Hirsch
Oct 8, 2005
Views
389
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I’m starting to learn to mask wispy hair and have quick question.

I did a mask which came out pretty well, and what’s interesting is that I see the running ants at points between strands of hair, indicating that the background will show through these strands of hair. But what’s interesting, which I don’t understand, is that there are many areas of space between chunks of hair that don’t have running ants or, are not deselected, and yet when I look at the composite I made, I do indeed, thankfully, see the background between those hairs anyway.

How is that? In other words, when it come to running ants, and seeing your selection, you are not always seeing what you will get?
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JJ
John Joslin
Oct 8, 2005
The "running ants" can only be an indication of the selection border if it is at all feathered or anti-aliased.

It doesn’t have a discrete border.
JS
John_Slate
Oct 8, 2005
The marching ants appear along the border of 50% selected pixels, which explains this message that you see sometimes: "Warning: no pixels were more than 50% selected. The selection edges will not be visible".

To really see your selection, dip into quickmask mode, and you can paint on it, feather, etc… whatever you can do to a graycale channel, you can do to the quickmask channel.
LH
Linda_Hirsch
Oct 9, 2005
Thanks JOhns! both of you.

How do you paint and feather at same time?

Now lets talk about the "space between the hairs"

I see from the new bg not the clear bg, but a new hazy one. So the trick is to somehow get those hairs as white as possible in my channel and the space between them as black as possible, WITHOUT destroying the hairs — which seems like a real hat trick. any tips?
D
deebs
Oct 9, 2005
Linda: I seem to recall the undefinable, enigmatic and illustrious Dr Russel Brown has a tutorial on this (at least I’m sure I viewed one)

Have you tried www.russelbrown.com?

There was another tutorial source I highly favored at wz2k.com

As you guessed, selecting for hair is pretty tricky
JS
John_Slate
Oct 9, 2005
You might try isolating the hair on it’s own layer and apply a bit of advanced blending.
D
deebs
Oct 9, 2005
Apologies! It is Russell with 2 l’s.

I’ve just had a look at his tips and techniques and I believe he offers some brushes that can be used to ‘paint’ hair in again…
T
Terrat
Oct 10, 2005
Fur and hair are impossible to paint out by hand. Who wants to lose their sanity over a strands of hair, whiskers, or fur? Try the channels before hand and eye.

-Make a copy of the channel that has the most contrast between hair and background, probably the red channel in the case of red hair.

-Further enhance the Red Copy Channel with levels or curves for high contrast which best defines your area; where the whites are whiter and the blacks are blacker. You need a better definition of strands.

-Then apply the High Pass filter to see if you can create a halo that further separates the hair from the background.

Then,
Sometimes, you can paste as a layer and use the white matte defringe to get rid of the whites or blacks depending on what you wish to delete. And later you can use this as your selection or mask.

Someimes it is a mask that can be called up inside the Extract dialog. And the brushes will take out your background.

Mask Pro and Knock Out were once favoured over the Extract command, but Photoshop has improved since these filters first came out.
LH
Linda_Hirsch
Oct 10, 2005
thanks all. Dr. Brown tutorial is great. any other great one?
D
deebs
Oct 10, 2005
Did you view the Advanced Masking movie?

The technique is much as described by Terrat with pleasant use of dodge and burn tools to fine tune a mask

These may have something but it has been so long since i last looked at the site

<http://www.wz2k.co.uk/>

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