QUICK and EASY for both dark and light hair in Photoshop!

G'day everyone, my name is Hoy. I'm going to show you how to remove hair halos in Photoshop. Now, what are hair halos, you ask? Well, it's when you mask things out and then you still get these white little fringes around your hair because it's so difficult to remove from your hair. Now, the fix that I'm going to show you is going to remove it. Look at that. And no matter which background you have against it, it will look fantastic. I'm also going to show you the fix for a model with blonde hair. Here is the issue when you mask it out. And here is the fix. Again, no matter what background I choose, it also looks fantastic. So if you want to follow along with the exact images that I'm using here, the link to the images are in the description. OK, so let's start with this model with the dark hair. There are many different ways to remove the halos from hairs. This is just another method to add to your arsenal. The first thing that we need to do is mask the model out because this isn't a masking tutorial. I'm not going to go into detail, but if you want more detail on masking, please check out the links in the description. So let's get our object selection tool here. Let's click on our model. And then once the selection comes up, let's click on this mask adjustment layer. Now, the object selection tool makes a pretty good selection most of the time, but it's only when you put a solid colour behind it that we can really only tell whether the selection or the mask, I should say, is pretty good. So I'm going to choose a dark red here. It doesn't really matter what colour it is, so long as it's dark. I'm going to press OK, click and drag to move the layer behind. And you can see if I zoom in a little bit and change my tool to a move tool so I don't get this pink overlay, these white areas are what we're trying to get rid of. And it's difficult to get rid of that because it's so thin. Now, somehow we need to change the edge or the halos into a dark colour to match her hair. And in this case, it's going to be black. Now, we can do that using blend mode. So let's click on this layer here. But before we move on, let's be a little bit tidy and organise and rename our layer. Let's double click on that and type something like model. And now we can change our blend modes. Let's go down to multiply and that's what we'll use. Depending on your specific image and the colour of the hair in your image, you might want to check out dark and multiply, et cetera, and maybe even darker colour. In this case, multiply looks good for us. And now you can see that the edge has changed into a dark colour. But the only problem is that the whole model, the whole picture has gone red. Somehow we need to keep the edge dark, but retain everything else as the original colour. And we can do that by making a duplicate. So just make sure that your model layer is still selected. Duplicate the layer by pressing command or control J. And now let's change the blend mode back to normal. And not surprisingly, we're back to where we started. To get the best of both worlds, what we're going to do is mask the edges of this out while keeping the rest of the image untouched. Because there is a already intricate mask on my normal blend mode layer here, I don't want to disturb that. So what I'm going to do is make another mask by grouping it with itself. So with this layer selected, let's press command or control G. Now, again, let's keep nice and tidy and keep track of our layers and groups by double clicking on it and we'll type in something like normal blend mode. And now we create a mask on top of that. And what we want to do is just mask out these areas that we want the fringe to disappear. So let's grab our brush B on the keyboard and let's just dial down our flow to something really small. Maybe it's 15. And the reason why we want to do that is we want to make incremental changes so you don't see a big step change when you finish your masking. So I'm going to make sure that my brush is also got a hardness of zero. What I've just done is just right clicked on my image and just dialed down the hardness. And my brush size should be around about 375. It's basically big enough to catch the edge here. Once I'm OK with that, just click outside of it. And now I'm just slowly going to paint away the edge of the halos, where the halos are. Now, I don't want to go all the way in. So you've got to be a little bit careful about where you mask out. Now, in this bit, you might want to reduce the flow of your brush even further because this is the sort of reflection and we want a little bit of the red reflection, so that's why we're going to reduce our flow to maybe even 5 percent. And that will make a slightly translucent effect. Now, if you've done too much masking out in certain areas, you can always mask it back in by flipping the color of your mask from black to white. That will make it reappear again. So the keyboard shortcut to flip your colors around is X. Now, this looks good to me for the purposes of this tutorial, but for your image, if you're following along, just take the time to perfect it. Now, let's check out how well they stand against different colored backgrounds. So let's double click on this solid color here and let's move this and see whether it is OK. Now, you can see that we can perfect the mask a little bit by masking these little bits out. So let me just quickly do that. Let's cancel that and let's just mask this out a little bit more. Let's go back to our solid color and just change the color and you can do it as many times as you like. So let's settle on this color here, press OK. So that's how you remove hair halos from dark hair. But what about light hairs? Well, let's go to our other image, which is this stock image here, which you can also download from the description. And the technique is very, very similar. There's only one change to the step, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So the first step is to create a mask out of this, right? So let's go to our object selection tool. Let's click once here, wait for the selection and then press this mask button here. Let's create a solid color. And this time we're going to create a light color because that's where the issue would normally come out. Let's click and drag it so it's behind this model image. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And this is what I mean by the halos here. You've got this grayish color here. Let's just spend a little bit of time to fix our mask because the more effort we put on perfecting our mask, the better our result will be. I'm going to rename this, double click on that model and then press return or enter. And I want to see this mask in a bigger view. So let's press Option or Alt on your keyboard and then click once on your mask. Let's scroll in a little bit bigger. And what we're going to do is just spend a few moments making this mask a little bit better. Now, as I mentioned, this isn't a masking tutorial, so I won't go in depth. Let's grab our brush tool B on the keyboard. Let's change our blend mode to overlay. And with a flow of, say, 20 percent and our foreground color as white, make sure that our mask is selected. I'm just going to paint this in. And the reason why I'm using the overlay blend mode is that it will only color in white areas that are closer to white and will leave the dark areas. If you use the normal brush, regardless of what color it is, if you use the white brush, it's going to change everything to white, whether it's white or black or gray, it's going to make visible everything that you paint on. So something like this is OK for our purposes. And let's switch back to our image view, Option or Alt on the keyboard, and then just click on your mask. And you can see a little bit better the problem that we have here. Unlike this image here where we needed to change the layer into a multiply blend mode to make things darker, because this model's hair is lighter, we need not the multiply blend mode, but a blend mode that makes things lighter. What we're going to do is change the blend mode from normal to screen. You can see again, it's changed the whole thing into a lighter image. Just zoom out out of that. And the same thing as before, we want to keep elements of this layer, but keep elements of the original layer. Let's make a duplicate of this layer, Command or Control J, and let's change this blend mode to normal. And now we're going to make a group out of this. So Command or Control G and let's double click on that normal blend mode. And now we're just going to brush all these out like before. Now, before we do that, we've got to remember to change your blend mode from overlay to normal. And that's really important, because if you don't change it, the next step is not going to work. So let's change our flow to something around 20 percent and make sure our foreground color is black. Now let's zoom in a little bit so we can see what we're doing and we will just start to paint this in. Now that it's done, you can always reduce the opacity if it's too bright by just clicking and dragging on this here. Or if it's not bright enough for whatever reason, you can always duplicate that layer by pressing Command or Control J and that will make it increasingly light. So that's not what I wanted. So let's undo that a few times and I'm happy with that. Now, let's just check how this goes on different color backgrounds. So let's double click on this solid color here and let's change it to. Well, let's just move this out the way and let's just check and look at that. It looks amazing, doesn't it? And that's how you can remove hair halos from models with dark hair and models with light hair. Now, if you learn something new or if you enjoy this video, let me know about it by commenting, liking or subscribing. Better still, hit the bell icon so you can get notified for when my next video is out.