Thursday, May 28, 2015

CoffeeShop Photoshop/PSE Retouching Tutorial: Remove Color Casts in Hair


We haven't floated away here in Texas yet, but it has been horrible weather.  Surrounding roads are flooded but so far our house is OK; unlike some of my friends.  My parents are trapped in their subdivision and have been for days.   We had severe drought for years so I guess we are playing catch up...  Stay high, dry, and safe everyone!

Today I wanted to show you several ways I would remove color casts from hair using Photoshop or PSE.  I will also show you a quick trip to remove shadow off skin.


I used this beautiful image from Jill Wellington (Facebook, Blog, Free Photoshop Videos) on this tutorial.  You can download the image  here if you want to practice along with my tutorial.  You can also read about the "Vintage Val" photoshoot here.

I love this image. Vintage Val is gorgeous, the background is perfect, the pose is beautiful, the light is stunning....  I can go on and on about this image.

But I did notice that there was a bit of bluish tint in her hair from the hat.


If I zoom in you can see it.  This is no big deal and easy to fix.  There is also a shadowy skin area on her forehead I am going to retouch.


1.  Hue/Saturation Layer:  Sometimes you can remove the color cast with just a simple Hue/Saturation layer.  Add a Hue/Saturation layer and click on the little hand icon (arrow pointing toward it in my screenshot above) and click on the area in her hair with the color cast.

In this case I clicked a few areas on her blue hair and it came up with green and cyan.  I lowered the saturation on both of those settings.  Now the blue/green is reduced in the entire image.  Not so pretty.


I added black to the layer mask and then used a soft white brush in normal mode at 100% and painted over the hair with the bluish color tint.  To see where you are painting, click on the layer mask while holding Shift/Alt-Option (and repeat to remove it).


Unfortunately removing the blue left her with some grayish areas in her hair.  I need to add back in some color.


2.  Add Color:  I made a new layer and grabbed the eyedropper (I) and then clicked on an area where her hair had some pretty color.  Then I grabbed a soft brush and painted over most of her hair.


I need to blend this in, so I put this layer in Soft Light mode, 100%.  This is better, but not perfect.


I copied that layer (Ctrl-J) and put the copy in Color mode, 100%.  Really nice!  It did remove some of her highlights so I could add a layer mask and remove some of this layer, but I am satisfied with this version. Since I added the Color  layer I could probably turn off/throw away the Hue/Saturation layer.


I wanted to add some vibrancy to her beautiful hair, so I added a Vibrance layer on top and brought up the Vibrance and Saturation until I was happy with the hair color.  I then made the layer mask black and used a soft white brush at 100% opacity to paint over her hair.  Pretty!


Then I noticed that her forehead had a shade-spot (is that a word?) where the skin was slightly darker.  Easy fix.

3.  Remove Shade-Spot:  I made a new layer on top and grabbed the eyedropper (I) and clicked on a light area of her skin (the tip of her nose in this case) and then I painted over the shaded skin area circled above with a soft brush.  I keep this layer in normal mode and then reduced the opacity to 51% to blend it in.  Now her face has even light.  You can even paint out under-eye circles using this method.


Now you can see the difference.  It only took a few minutes and I am really happy with the results.


Here are all of the layers labeled so you can see what I did for the final edit.

I hope this little tutorial is helpful!  If there is anything you would like to see here on my blog please leave a comment.

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1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the tips!

    Glad to hear you guys are still high and dry.

    Lisa D.

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