How to Deal With Hair When Changing Backgrounds in a Digital Photo

A beautiful woman with soft hair

There are many kinds of image-editing programs available and as many ways to keep hair separated from a picture's background when changing backgrounds in a digital portrait. Within Photoshop, there are even various ways of accomplishing this task, but for this tutorial, the Magic Wand is the primary tool used.

Instructions

Isolate the background from the hair

1. Choose the Magic Wand, and set its tolerance to 15. Also check Anti-alias and Contiguous.

   Click on the various parts of the background being careful to not select any parts of the hair. (Blow up the finer parts of the hair and hold down the shift key and use the Vector Lasso selection tool to select areas that the Magic Wand missed. Hold down the Option key (Mac), Alt key (PC) and use the Vector Lasso to remove any selections of hair.

2. 

   Choose Select on the menu bar, and scroll down to Save Selection, name the selection "Background" and click "OK." This will also create a Channels layer. Choose the Channels view, and select the newly created mask to see what is selected---it should appear as a transparent red shape.

   Retouch any rough edges with the Paintbrush and Eraser tools---adjust the brush size accordingly, and be sure to set its foreground color as black.

3. Now you're ready to change the background color without changing the hair color.
   Load the Channel mask as a selection under the Select drop-down and return to the Layers view.

   Choose the Image drop-down in the menu bar, go to Adjustments and choose Hue/Saturation.

   Slide the Hue slider to +30 to make the background foliage greener. Slide the Saturation slider to +25 to increase the color depth to all of the background.

4. 

   Select "Inverse Selection" under the Select drop-down.
   Choose the Paintbrush again, and make the mode Color and the Opacity 75%.
   Click the adjacent background color outside of the selection with Option click (Alt click for PC), adjust the brush size accordingly and lightly paint any small openings/holes in the outside hair with the brush to make the background color behind the hair match the background color that's next to it.

5. Save the image in a usable format for your application.

   Save the original with mask as a .psd file

Tips & Warnings

• Remember that any selection you save becomes a mask in Channels that can be retouched by hand with the Paintbrush and Eraser tools and then reloaded as a selection.