6 Cut Out Hair - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. In this section we're going to show you how to cut out your subject specializing on your subject's hair so they're going to be suitable for any type of background. Let's jump in. So here we have our subject looking really good. We're going to start off with our contextual taskbar. Go up here to select subject. Let's go ahead and click on that and then of course we're just going to click right here on our layer mask icon. Fantastic. Now this does a pretty good job. Let's go ahead just to test it out. Let's go ahead we're going to grab our adjustment layers and we're going to go to solid color. There we go. Let's just put a white solid color layer. We're going to put that directly underneath our subject. All right. So we can see this actually looks really quite good. Let's just go ahead and zoom in. Maybe just like a couple little areas we need to clean up here. So let's click on our layer mask B for the brush tool and we're just going to make our like brush a little bit smaller using the open and close brackets. There we go. And just go ahead and like paint that visible. That's just it selected a little bit of the background but that's totally okay. Now in this case if you're using just a white background and it looks actually quite good. Let's go ahead and I'm going to hit ctrl or command j to duplicate that color fill. Let's go ahead and double click and we're just going to go like to a dark red or something like that. Okay now here is where kind of like the issue arises if you will. We can see on a white background it looked really good. On a dark red background you see all of this stuff. So what we're going to do is basically this area here if you photograph the person on a dark red background these hairs would be kind of dark against the dark background rather than light against the dark background. That's why it doesn't look real. So what we're going to do is use a levels adjustment layer to basically make this area the light area. We're going to make it darker and that's going to make it look a lot better and it's going to keep the original color of the hair too. It's just going to take the lightest areas of these hairs and make them darker. Okay so to do that let's go ahead and click on our layer with our subject. We're going to go to layer down to new adjustment layer and we're going to go to levels layer new adjustment layer and levels. Okay now let's go ahead right here where it says use previous layer to create clipping mask. Let's go ahead and check on that to make sure that it does clip. Again let's go to our layers to make sure that we have our subject and then we have our levels adjustment layer which has this little down arrow that's letting us know that it's clipped. Basically it's only going to affect our subject. Okay so now with our levels adjustment layer we're going to go ahead and take this slider here on the bottom. So with the levels adjustment layer you have two sliders basically two graphs. You have this top graph okay and this bottom graph. We're going to take this on the right hand side from our bottom and just drag this from the right to the left. Okay and as I do this there we go. I'm not paying attention to like my subject's face. I'm just the hair. Just the hair is what I need to look at. Okay there we go and something like that looks pretty good. See how it looks much more natural now? Fantastic. So basically I'm taking the lightest pixels in my subject. There we go and we're just making them darker. Taking the lightest area and making it darker until the hair blends in really well. All right that looks great. So we're going to go back to our layers now and obviously this is visible everywhere which we don't want. We only want it to be visible on our subject's hair and just the outside of the hair. So we're going to go to the layer mask here and we can click on our contextual taskbar and go to invert mask here. Invert mask or you can hit ctrl or command i. Okay so now what we're going to do is use our brush tool. Let's hit b for the brush tool. Let's just make our brush a little bit larger. You can use your open and close brackets for that and then we're going to paint with white on our layer mask. Basically this is just going to reveal this levels adjustment layer. Okay it's just going to reveal it making it visible. So anywhere where I paint white on the layer mask here for this level adjustment layer is just going to now show, there we go, show this levels adjustment layer that we just made and it's just basically just going to darken all this up. Okay so it's taking the lightest area of the hair which looks totally fine on a light background. You might not even want to do this or need to do this on a light background but on a dark colored background it definitely, you know, it definitely shows. It just doesn't look right. It looks kind of off a little bit. Okay there we go and just kind of put that around the edge until the transition. There we go. Between light and dark looks a little bit better. Fantastic. All right and that looks good. Now it's looking a little bit too dark around the edge. There we go. You can see it kind of, you can kind of see it right. It doesn't look that great. So the next thing we're going to do, let's go back into our levels adjustment layer and we're going to take our darkest point and we're just going to bring that up a little bit. Okay so it's going to take, it's not going to make it so so so dark. Basically that's the trick here. So you're making, you know, you're making your lights much darker. There we go and you're making your darks a little bit lighter at the same time. Fantastic. So that's the first step and sometimes that's going to be all you need and you can see that makes a huge difference especially if we're zoomed out before and after, you know, like yeah already quite a big difference. Let's just use our brush. We're going to go a little bit larger with our brush and I'm just going to paint it so it kind of feathers in towards the edge so it's not so like obvious that you just used photoshop to like darken out the outsides of her hair. Right there we go. So you can see, let's hold alt or option and click on the layer mask. This is now what the layer mask looks like. So I just made it blur and made sure that it actually shows up towards the inside of the subject's hair as well. So there's that before and the after and that's looking pretty good. Now I know it took a little bit of light away from, you know, like certain areas of the hair. If you want to go into you can definitely go in with your layer mask and paint like black with your brush tool and bring in some more of this light if you want to. There we go. That's going to help it make it look a little bit more realistic too. So I'm just going painting black on my layer mask now. There we go. Fantastic. Just to like bring in some highlights of the curls and things like that. So it looks a little bit more natural and a little bit less like you just used photoshop. Now the other thing you can do here is, if you want to, you can create a new layer above all this. We're going to clip this as well. So let's right click and go down to where it says create clipping mask. Here down on the bottom create clipping mask. Fantastic. And then I can use the clone stamp tool. So I can hit s for my clone stamp tool. Make sure here at the top it says sample current and below and I can actually sample this hair on the inside. So hold alt or option. We'll zoom in a little bit. Alt or option and sample the hair on the inside and then kind of paint it in towards the outside a little bit. Now you want to kind of like make sure you're sampling from the right places in the hair. You know you don't necessarily want to sample from this area if it should be a different texture. But by doing this I can kind of like remove. You can see here like it doesn't look that great. I can sample from here and then paint it in and then it's going to be actual like hair detail all the way towards the edge. Okay so this is a pretty good technique if you like if you need to do a little bit of cleanup and things like that at the very edge. This is going to be fantastic for you. All right and then it looks like here the layer mask for our subject just when I went to select subject the layer mask is like uh it's okay. It needs a little bit of work. There we go. So let's go ahead and just kind of clean this up and you can do this with the brush tool. There we go. So now hold shift and kind of like click through here. There we go. Select out my subject's hair and then just kind of go in here and do a little cleanup. Fantastic. All right. Really nice. Now a lot of the time, let me just clean this side up too. Fantastic. A lot of the time if you have any areas of hair where it's like kind of just looks like this, sometimes it can be a good idea. Let's go ahead and just group our subject with with herself. Okay. Sometimes it can be a good idea. I'll just hit control or command J to duplicate the entire group and then kind of like move this down here. Okay and then let's hit control or command T. Maybe just rotate this a little bit. So I'm just going to grab like a different section of her hair and hit enter. I know it's kind of silly but there we go. It works well. You can just put a layer mask on this. Let's go ahead and put a layer mask. Let's go to invert mask and then use our brush tool to just paint white right over here. So I'm basically just like painting more hair from a different part of our subject's head but it can really do a nice job to kind of like fill in gaps if you need it to. There we go. So that's just like literally from a different part of our subject's head but it actually works pretty well. There we go. So this is looking really good. Basically, this is all we need. So if we have our subject on a white background like no big deal. That usually works pretty well but now we can put our subject on a black background. Let's go ahead and test out different backgrounds. Double click right there and see you know on a dark green background, on a dark blue background. Literally any background you put your subject on is going to work now because we went ahead and cut out the subject but we also did some work kind of like recoloring the hair using this levels adjustment layer and a little bit of the clone stamp really makes a difference and helps your subject looks perfect on any color background. Alrighty, thanks so much for watching. We'll see you in the next section. Bye everyone!