How To Change Hair Colour In Photoshop

Hi, my name is Tom. I'm an edit assistant and a graphic designer. And, I'm now going to show you how to change hair color using Adobe Photoshop.

Okay, here's an example that I made previously. It's a picture of this girl. She originally had blonde hair, as we can see.

And I've added a mask and then played around with the saturations of the hair color. It gives you this purple-like, pinkish effect. So, I'm just going to remove that layer, so I can show you how it all works.

So first of all, we want to make a mask of her hair. Now, hair is quite difficult to mask out because it has many strands. We zoom in using Apple or Control if you're on a PC, using the + or symbols.

As you can see in this image, her hair is fairly neat and quite easy to mask out, which is why I chose this particular image. We want to create a mask of her hair so we can start messing around with the colors. First, what I want to do is I'm going to enter Quick Mask Mod by pressing Q on your keyboard.

Over on the side, you can see that we have entered Quick Mask Mode. So using the brush tool, over on the left hand side or B as the shortcut on your keyboard, we can now change the size of the brush to start painting out the areas which we want to make the mask for. I'm going to use quite a large brush so I can do this quite quickly.

So, I'm going to use quite a large brush so that I can do this process quickly for the benefit of the tutorial. So, now what we need to do is to start painting. Now don't worry, the red isn't how the picture is going to finally look, you're just selecting out the area which you wish to mask.

I'm just going to go around and very quickly paint out her hair. Now, you can choose to use smaller brushes but the more fiddly areas are slightly more difficult to get to. Again, you guys will have a lot more time than I have, so you can go through and paint out every single hair if that's what you choose to do.

So again, just increasing the brush size, I'm going to just paint out the hair area around her face on her head. So as you can see, I'm using the hand tool which is the spacebar on the keyboard, so you can move the object around, so it's easier to manipulate. And like I said before, if you spend time on making sure you've masked out all the hair properly, you'll get a better result.

So if you have made a slight mistake, say you accidently paint on her face like that, you can use the erase tool on the far left, here, on the tool pad or E, the shortcut on the keypad and you can just erase the errors. So you don't want to mask out her face, just the hair. So, you can go around and erase areas that you may have gotten slightly wrong.

I'm just going to try and get most of this out. Like I said before, the longer you spend on it, the better the effect will be. So that's a really rough selection of her hair.

Okay, so now what we want to do. You want to make a brand new layer of her hair, so we want to exit to Quick Mask Mode; it's the same as entering, by pressing Q. And you can see, we've got a selection of her hair, which is what I painted around.

Now we don't want the background, we just want a selection of the hair. To invert the selection, if you hold down apple or control on your PC, hold shift and press I, that will now just select the inside of our selection. Now we're going to make a new layer containing just her hair.

The shortest way to do that is to hold down apple or control on a PC and press J. So, now that we have her hair selected, to create the most authentic looking hair color change, we're going to go to layer New Fill Layer, Solid Color. And this brings up this new option, here.

Set the Mode to Soft Light. And you'll see why in a second. So, we hit okay.

So, now we can change the color of her hair. I'm just going the put in a very basic pink for now or purple, purply-pink. So you have a slight change there, already.

You can