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How To:
Hair Replacement
Discover The Exciting Capabilities Of Your
Editing Software While Getting A New Head Of Hair
Text And Photography By Ibarionex
R. Perello
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Once we pass our teens, few
of us are willing to make an extreme change when it comes to
our hair. We may make it a little longer or a litter shorter,
but spikes or afro-puffs are usually out of the question. Yet,
we can see what our friends or we, ourselves, would look like
with a radically different hairstyle using the computer and
photo-imaging software—changing hair color is easy
and doesn’t involve hanging your head over a sink! |
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To begin, I selected
an image and created a duplicate layer. I isolated the hair
by using a Selection tool and used the Color Adjustment control
to make radical changes to the color of the hair. Though the
initial color shift was way over the top, I made it appear more
natural by simply adjusting the opacity of the duplicate layer
until the hair color appealed to me.
In this way, I was able to change my brown-haired subject to
a blonde, a redhead and even a purple-haired hipster. Unlike
the real world, I could quickly revert to the original hair
color by simply deleting the duplicate layer and moving on to
something else.
Changing hair length is easy to achieve,
too. Using a Cloning tool, you can both lengthen a hairstyle
or put the scissors to it. For cutting hair, I simply
selected the area that I wanted the Clone tool to duplicate.
In this case, it was the background directly behind my subject’s
head. Then, I carefully moved the tool around the hair that
I wanted to eliminate. Within minutes, my subject had a haircut
and I had no mess that needed sweeping up.
To lengthen hair, I used the same Cloning tool, but instead
of selecting the background, I chose the existing hair as my
target. I slowly moved the Cloning tool to the area around the
head and created the appearance of significantly more hair.
While it didn’t look particularly stylish, it give me a
sense of the difference in appearance.
To make a real radical change, I took photographs of some friends
and used their hair on my subject. As in the first example,
I isolated the hair using a Selection tool, inverted the selection
and then deleted the rest of the subject. This left me with
only a head of hair. I took this selection and drag-and-dropped
it onto the image of my subject. (This works much better if
your subjects were taken at the same focal length and the same
camera-to-subject distance. Otherwise, you’ll need to resize
one image to match the other.)
Appearing as a new layer on my main picture, I moved the hair
until it appeared correctly on my subject. Though the outside
of the hair looked fairly natural, the edge of the hair that
came in contact with the subject’s face didn’t look
seamless. To make it appear more natural, I used the Cloning
tool and selected a random Painting tool to create an edge effect
that looked like strands of hair. (The standard Circular tool
looked too blotchy.)
The ease by which I isolated certain elements of a subject,
the ability to create a natural blend between two layers and
the discovery of the power of different painting tools made
this experiment not only fun, but worthwhile, too. It helped
me hone my skills, which I can apply to my normal use of my
photo-editing software. |
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