New Techniques for Cutting Out Hair in Photoshop CS5
17. Jun, 2010 
23 Comments
Photoshop CS5 comes with some exciting tools for designers, one of them that stand out is the new Refine Edge tool. It really helps when cutting out an object from a background especially when it involves human hair or any type of fur that is troublesome and can be tricky to achieve a realistic look. With Photoshop CS5 it is now possible to achieve the task very easily. Here are a couple techniques you can use on images especially those those with varied background tones, the results takes just a few mouse clicks. In this tutorial we will be replacing a dull background with a very cool sunset, Check it out!
Final Image
Resource
- sunbathing 2 from Stock.xchng
- Sunset from Astoria, Queens from Stock.xchng
Step 1
Open the sunbathing 2 from Stock.xchng, then crop it down to about 24×24 inches, removing the majority of the sky.
Step 2
Use the Quick Selection Tool, to do a rough selection of the girl. Make the brush size about 37 pixels in diameter at 100% hardness. brush over the image of the girl to do the quick selection.
Step 3
Now use the new Refine Edge tools in Photoshop CS5 to help us out. Click on the Refine Edge button.
The first thing you should do is decide which “View Mode” you want to work with, this will all depend on the image you are working on. With this particular image we want to see the outline of the hair, so go ahead and set the View Mode to Black and White, this will give us a nice mask.
Step 4
Set the Edge Detection to Smart Radius, then bump the Radius up to 99.0%
Step 5
Change the View Mode to Black, you will notice that the model has some blue from the sky in her hair and on the edges of her skin.
Step 6
Turn on Decontaminate Colors and set the amount to 68%
Tweak your settings by switching back and forth between view modes. When you are satisfied, set your Output to New Layer With Mask. Then press OK.
You will notice that Photoshop automatically created a new layer with a mask and turned off your original image layer.
Step 7
Now open and drag the Sunset from Astoria, Queens image from Stock.xchng, and place it below the Mask Layer.
Final Image
Conclusion
As you can see the new Refine Edge tool, is a nice addition to Photoshop, it really help to speed up the design process with really great results, it is not a perfect tool for every situation, but it is great to have for those difficult and time consuming projects. Try experimenting with other objects and see what kind of results you get.
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Author Info
Amazing! thanks for the tip!
Happy you found it useful
You lost some hair details
. But good tut anyway 
Nice tut. But.. its too easy to crop such high contrasted picture. What about cutting blond hair from pink, and bright backgrounds?
Thanks for the thought, but with every tool in Photoshop, they can only be used with certain types of projects. See my conclusion above…
“it is not a perfect tool for every situation, but it is great to have for those difficult and time consuming projects.”
I also gave a link where you can learn to do it the old fashioned way in my opening paragraph: link
Wow…. That is the exact answer I was needing.
Do you live in Astoria? I do!
Lovely tool. Nice tut. This is an easier way to get the job done – better than how I learned how to do it in school.
Wow, that was incredibly easy.
In CS3, it would have been like this:
1. High pass filter to sharpen the hair.
2. Duplicate Blue channel
3. Make tons of adjustments to obtain a good contrast.
4. Cut out.
Rly tiresome!
Thx for post, it’s great!
That is so true Doink, Photosho has come a long way
Wow, I never thought to use High Pass filter for that…
…and now it’s obsolete…
The “refine edges” feature is one of the most exciting features of PS CS5 and I’m sure that it will become one of the most used in tutorials.
Thanks for this tip…i found it very very helpful!
wow this really new techniques for cutting out hair in photoshop . .thanks for sharing this tip, very helpful . .
It’s been a long wait for this. Good work Adobe.
useful tut, thanks!
I wish this tutorial worked with backgrounds that are have a lot going on…. Its really good for pictures with people in front of flat backgrounds…..
Anyone know of any ways to short cut the path tool when the background is not simply flat, but has a lot going on in it?
Yes. But it requires more work
Here’s what you have to do:
1. Identify the base colors from your background.
2. Duplicate the respective channels (preferably blue or green, since the skin does not have any of these tones)
3. Work on every channel till you turn them to white (or black).
4. CTRL+SHIFT+click them to load selections et.. voila!
You’ll have a really good selection of what you’re about to cut out
Takes longer, but it works.
Good tut/technique for the hair, but the resulting image is so out-of-whack and doesn’t look right at all, because in original photo, she is sitting in bright sunlight, with sun shining directly on her face, and sunglasses… then you put a background that has her sitting there (still with sun shining directly on face) with a darkening sky and now the sun is setting behind her as well as shining brightly in front of her??? I think a better image should have been selected for background, and a little more thought to realism would make this tut much better.
The tutorial is not about recreating atmosphere, the background used it’s only generic, you can easily add a Fill layer if you want.
Tutorials are not supposed to create an overall outstanding outcome, they are supposed to teach new techniques to do /create new things. It’s like I would write a tut about shading on a human body drawn from scratch. Not only you would have to learn to shade, but you would also learn to draw the human body – muscles, proportions, pose, bones, skin tones.
great concise tutorial… thanks for this!
Great Tutorial. Thanks works so nice.
Photoshop CS5 is flat-out AMAZING! Now I don’t have to install a third-party masking plug-in to make difficult selections easier, and if I want to cut a subject out from its background, it’s WAY easier!
cool man but tell me about other settings plzzzz