Detailed Background Making It Hard to Cut the Subject Out? This Is the Solution

We've all cut out people from the background. I have edited several magazine covers where things needed to be changed or replaced. Hair is always the biggest hassle and concern. 

Photoshop gives us a lot of power with regards to cutting out an object, and through the years they've listened to what the photographers were asking for. We now have the Select and Mask option that gives you the hair selection tool which makes the process much faster that cutting hair out with the pen tool or masking it back after you've pasted it. But, Photoshop can do even more. 

What if you could use your tablet to paint in realistic hair, to add back in what you lost with the selection? 

In this video, you can learn to cut out hair, and paint it back using a tablet. My world has changed. In the past I've had to cover a nipple with hair because it was to explicit to appear on a cover of a magazine, and I settled for cutting hair from one section of the image and pasting it over the nipple, and then blending it into the hair to look realistic. It was a tedious process, where this seems like much more of a fun and better way to work with hair in your image. 

How do you do selections of hair when you need to? Would you use this method or do you have a method of your own? 

Wouter du Toit's picture

Wouter is a portrait and street photographer based in Paris, France. He's originally from Cape Town, South Africa. He does image retouching for clients in the beauty and fashion industry and enjoys how technology makes new ways of photography possible.

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4 Comments

Listen to this guy. He’s photographed magazine covers AND nipples!

Way tooooo much work. I have a whole folder of hair stock that I've saved from past shoots. I can slap any of those behind the cut out person in a few minutes.

PiXimperfect's techniques and video tutorials are the BEST. Since I started following and implementing many of his techniques my images are so great that my business is growing. Thanks, Unmesh Dinda for helping me become a better photographer and retoucher.

This guy is a genius, very good at describing all of the steps and a good workflow, and the patience of the gods in his very detailed work. Another great tutorial from him!