PAINTING HAIR IN PHOTOSHOP

Well, you guys have asked and asked for it... so it was high time I sat down and did a tutorial on how I paint my hair. Now, this will be a fairly long tutorial. There's a lot of steps to painting hair the way I do.

REQUIREMENTSPhotoshop and a tablet, such as a wacom

These two things aren’t absolutely necessary, but since this is what I use to do my hair, I am doing this tutorial using them. You can adapt the tut to other software, should you prefer a different program that you're more familiar with. You can also opt to not use the tablet, but to get pressure sensitivity, its really a must, and pressure sensitivity is a key factor in making hair beautifully wispy. Also, I might add you DO NOT need any brushes, other than what comes with Photoshop. You can adapt this to other brushes too, as much as you can adapt it to anything. But remember, straying from the tutorial parameters may result in a completely different look. And while experimentation is a good thing indeed, I recommend sticking to the tut for your first shot out, to at least get a feel for it.

Also keep in mind, if you do not have a tablet enabled on your system, Photoshop will not allow you to enable shape dynamics on your brush settings. As I said, pressure sensitivity will not work without a tablet. So, you would naturally skip that step in the absence of a tablet.

Most of all, though... you need patience. The first time I painted hair, it was straight up HORRIBLE LOL And since, my hair has gone thru many stages and looks. But I persevered and practiced, til I got the hang of it, and liked the results enough to stick with them and cover the process in this tutorial. And painting tons of teeny little strands can be laborious too, let there be no mistake there. But a tip here... the tablet also makes this easier. If you're serious about painting, and don’t have a tablet, I *highly* recommend investing in one... I don’t know how I ever got along without it.

PAINTING THE BASESo naturally, you want to start with an image. I prefer to render as png's, and then assemble my images in Photoshop on PSD layers, as this allows me to get in front of and behind a figure, which helps when painting. If you render in software that will not render on transparency or as a PSD layer, you can alternatively erase where necessary. Just be very careful when erasing, so that you don’t erase a part that should be there. If choosing this option, you can also set your hair layer's opacity to a lower number temporarily, so you can see where exactly to erase, then ramp the opacity back up to 100% when you're done.

First thing is first... add a new layer on top of the image of the figure you’re painting hair on (in my case V4) You're going to paint ALL the hair on this one layer. Be sure to always add a layer to paint the hair on, coz if you later decide to change it up, it will be nearly impossible flattened, plus you want to be able to paint the hair without affecting the other parts of the image.

To add a new layer, you must go to the top of Photoshop, and select Layer/New which will open a pop out, on which you will choose "Layer" Make sure the mode is set to "Normal", Color: "None", Opacity: 100% (which is precisely what it is set to by default) hit ok and it will add your new layer. You can see the layer window in my screenshot below, with my settings:

Now, the first application will consist of the base color. This you want to be dark, probably a very dark gray, almost black. I prefer to stay away from black entirely though, coz grays blend better. You can alternatively choose a dark color to build up from, if you don’t want black/gray hair - I always paint in gray-scale and later tweak the hue later on, if I want color. I will cover that too, at the end.

Now you need to select a brush... go to your brush palette and select ANY of the round soft brushes that come with Photoshop (the soft ones look blurry when compared to hard edged rounds) Set it to a relatively smallish pixel size (like 10-20) I start out with a crude shape... just painting in the way I see the hair falling. It doesn’t matter if its a little messy, coz this is just a rough draft that will be tweaked further. It just helps to get an idea of where you are going, before actually going there.

Next, were going to smudge it. Select the smudge tool (it is below the blur tool, which looks like a drop, located on the tool bar which is at the left side of Photoshop - to access smudge, right click on the drop icon and then click the pointer finger icon) Then were going to apply a brush to the smudge tool itself, but not using a round brush as we did above. Instead we are going to use a speckled brush, which is 14px in size and comes with Photoshop. A screenshot of the brush itself is below, so you'll know exactly which one I used. My brush settings are also shown:

Now that you have the brush selected, you want to go to the brush settings and enable "shape dynamics" yet once again. There is method in my madness with enabling shape dynamics on everything - the strands end up a lot wispier, than they would if painting with it not set, because it paints thinner the more lightly you press. You may also want to shrink the pixel size slightly or enlarge it even, depending on how big the head is in your scene (but 14 is usually perfect - I rarely change it) Now, set the smudge tool's mode to "Darken", at about 95% exposure

On the same layer where we just added those roughly drafted strands, we're now going to smudge the hair downward. You want it to be somewhat wavy, so you want smudge it as "S" shapes and serpentine like curves. You want to ease up on the pressure while doing this... so that you're getting fine strands - thicker where necessary. Really, it takes a good eye and feel for your tablet, to get the right results. You can also paint smaller and shorter strands at the top of the hair, to get the flyaway feel to it, such as real hair would be. You want to keep smudging til you have a base you're happy with. So here's my image, now that I’m done with that:

PAINTING STRANDS So, our hair looks pretty crude still. But now comes the fun part... painting the strands! So first, we must choose a brush.... we are going to select yet another soft brush, set it to 2 or 3 pixels (the bigger the head, the higher you go, but not too high as they need to be thin) and again, enable shape dynamics as we did with the other brushes. Since I chose to use dark gray as my base, I’m going to use gray-scale colors to do the strands. I will now select a gray-scale color that’s a little lighter than my base. If you chose to use a color, you would naturally choose a lighter shade from the base, but staying within the same color range. Here's a screenshot of my settings:

Now, starting with the sides of the hair and the bangs, I start painting in lightly, strands of hair. The lighter you are with the tablet stylus, the thinner the strands come out. You can make some thin, some thicker and alternate as you feel that it looks good. Just keep in mind to stay with the general shape of the hair and paint long, quick, yet light strokes. Now, here is my image:

But that’s only the first base of strands. We are going to do a second base, using an even more slightly lighter color than we did last, but again, sticking in the same color range. So go ahead and choose a lighter color. Then we will repeat the painting of strands, once again, following the shape of the hair. And here's what my image looks like now:

A third and final strand layer comes now, but this time, we will not only choose an even lighter color than last, but we are going to set the brush mode to "screen" This will at long last, paint really light strands, which with the other two layers, gives the hair dimension.

Ok, looking better now... but there’s more work to be done.

DODGING, BURNING AND OTHER FINISHING TOUCHESNow we dodge in highlights. This is the main reason you want to keep everything on one layer, or when you get to this step, you will be doing it on multiple layers, and its hard to get it consistent. Dodging on everything at once creates a more realistic effect, which applies harmoniously to all the steps we just painted. So, now select the dodge tool, pick any soft brush and set it to medium sized with the hair. You don’t want the pixel size to be too big for this, and not too small either - about the size of a pencil's eraser should do, naturally, larger for bigger heads. Don’t set shape dynamics this time, either, as you want this to be fat and not thin and wispy. For the range on the dodge tool, you want to select "Highlights" Now, at random, dodge in highlights. Don’t do too much, just enough to look like a highlight on the hair which would occur from light. If you find its too bright, you can also set the exposure to 50% or something. Do this all over the hair, in places where the light would hit in such a way that these highlights would occur (such as on strands that stick out more than others would, or on the predominantly lit side of the image, where the main light is coming from)

But we're not done yet lol We're also going to use the burn tool to add shadowing in places opposed to highlighting (thus where the hair is folded back more, or overshadowed by where it happens to fall) If you find that your hair is too "Light" with not enough dark strands, you can also use the burn tool (set to 2 pixels, shape dynamics on) to paint in extra dark strands the same way you did with the brush in the earlier steps.

Here's what I have now:

When all is said and done, and you're comfortable with it, were going to do one last step. You don’t have to do this step, but it makes the hair glowy and more blended as I feel it should be. Go to filter/Blur and select Gaussian Blur. Set it to whatever you want, but not too high and not too low (something like 3.0 should be good) Now, its going to blur the entire layer. Go to the top of Photoshop, click where it says "edit" and select "Fade" on that list. A new dialog will pop up, with mode options. Set it to "Screen" and use the dial to test how light and glowy you want it to go. I usually stay toward the lower end of the spectrum, coz I don’t want the hair to overpower the rest of the image with its blinding lightness, yet I want it to be glowy enough to be different than how it looks set to 0. Occasionally (and in this example as well), I will do this step again after that, and select "Multiply" or different mode the second time (depending on my mood or what I personally like at the time) just to make it darker or more bold than just using screen does. But really, that will depend on the image and whether or not you feel that hurts or helps.

On a side note, you can also use that last Gaussian fade trick on the whole image, to give a nice glowy and polished look, when you're done working on it. You just have to toy with it a bit, changing modes or doing it a few times with different modes, to get a good final look you’re happy with.

COLOR SHIFTINGNow lets say, I painted in gray-scale, but now I’ve decided I want my hair to be in color. How doth I go about doing this?! Its simple! Still on the same layer, you will go to the top of Photoshop, select image/adjustments and then color balance. You must choose color balance, since there is an absence of color, so no amount of tweaking the hue and saturation will change it. There are three settings on here: Highlight, Midtone and Shadows. You can tweak at em all, but I usually just use Midtone, which it is set to by default. Using the dials on the color balance, you will tweak them til you get a good result. If you want red hair, I suggest tweaking red and yellow together. Want turquoise, use the cyan dial, perhaps with a bit of blue, or green, to ramp it more in either direction. Purple hair would entail blue and red, or magenta even. Just play around to get a good color to match the surroundings. That’s also another thing I prefer to do - that being, color that is reflected by the environment itself. If the sun is radiantly shining, with orange-yellow ambiance, hair would reflect those golden highlights in a real setting. So I try to stick with that phenomenon in my images as well. Rarely will I go with something that’s completely different (and usually, its black hair if I do) And now that you've added color, if you decide to later change it, you can use the hue and saturation panel instead (to get there, go to the same menu where the color balance resides, and choose hue/saturation) and alternatively, tweak the brightness and contrast to get lighter shades, such as silver and blonde.

I turned the hair color a light brown in the above image, just to give you an example to look at. But Oriental people don’t generally have brown hair; its black instead. So I’m tweaking mine to have a slight blueish-purplish tint to it (to reflect the surroundings a little), and I’m going to darken it up even more. I’m also going to erase with a very small 4-6 px brush, where the hair has covered her hand, so her hand will be on top of it instead of underneath it (remember to set the layer opacity, so you can see properly where to erase) And while I’m at it, I’m going to go ahead and paint the mane and beard on my two dragons too. Here is my final image: