Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial on hair. And picking up where we left off, we had selected some good areas of the hair with the Lasso Tool and jumped into new layers, added layer masking using a soft airbrush to brush away the edges. So we have a before and after. We are going to continue this by adding yet another new layer where we are going to use the Clone Stamp Tool.

So select that from your Toolbar. Normal Blending mode, using airbrush soft around, opacity 100%, flow 100%. You do not need to have a line check. For sample use current and below or all layers depending on what version you are in but we are going to clone some of these other areas by brushing it.

You have the source of point so, hold down the Alt key on your PC or Option on a Mac and click a good area of the hair that does not have a gap in it. So just click and then release both the mouse and the Alt or Option key and then move directly over to the area you want to start brushing. Keep your mouse held down, the crosshair is indicating where it is sourcing from so, be aware of that crosshair because it goes an area you do not want. That is also going to be cloned.

And if you do not source again it will jump back to that origin point which is good and safe sometime without having that aligned checkbox on in the top options bar. That is how I usually use it. Because as long as you hold your mouse down it is align that crosshair is following when you release without that check it is going to jump back to that origin point. Come over here source this a bit of hair right here, release and then come in here and drag, watching that crosshair to add a little bit more into that area.

Using the Clone Stamp Tool, you might see in apparent pattern start tool appear. So you can switch to the regular healing brush tool. Normal blending mode sampled current and below, I tend to use my healing brush using an elliptical shape which you can change by clicking up here in the options bar. Changing around this to 50% and then swinging your angle of the brush according to where you are going to be brushing. Again you have to source with this by Alt or Option clicking and then just rub out those apparent areas of stippling patterns that can occur. The healing brush preserves some of the texture but blends with the existing pixels that are below it, something like that.

With the healing brush selected to, you want to zoom in and look at some of the areas where your path was is often times so serious and you need a little blending to a little help. And you can just run along those and that will blend in a little bit better.

Zoom out, Control minus, so before and after there. We also, when you are doing hair patching take into consideration the original image and where the highlights were. I am going to Alt or Option click on this and you can see they start down here and kind of go upwards and the patching process has hidden some of those highlights that should naturally flow this way. So I am going to turn this back on.

There are several ways you can add a highlight but let us just add a Levels Adjustment Layer. So I will click on the black and white icon and choose levels and we want to make it lighter. So take the gamma slider and move it upwards a bit and maybe the white point sliders to the left as well. Click OK and then invert the mask by pressing Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh.

Now with white as the foreground color choosing an airbrush, we can paint a highlight. And sort of making a cone shape where it is a little whiter at the bottom and getting narrow or at the top. Further adjust it by changing the blending mode if you need it a little bit brighter, experiment with some of this color dodges, it is definitely not a good choice but we can go to screen and then lower the opacity and that give us a little bit more brightness put that about 70% and double click back on the adjustment. You have to use your eyes to analyze certain casts that are in the shadow area, it looks a little rosy to me.

So I am going to just go into the red channel. Red for rosy and introduce a tiny bit of red into that highlight by moving that gamma slider to the left. Click OK then I am going to come back out here with masking. Switch my foreground to black and kind of fine tune that, highlight here. And remove it from the existing highlight so that when we put in blends better. We do not need to make that other one brighter.

And I am going to add another levels adjustment layer for darkening. Click on the levels and take of the gamma slider to darken and move it to the right just a little bit and click OK. And then again we are going to invert that with a Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh. Switch to white as the foreground to reveal that darkening because I am just trying to fine tune that highlight and change the blending mode to darken. See if that helps or multiply, lower the opacity a bit. Then OK.

What I want to do here is darken this one little area here; these situations come up according to the image. So these are just showing you some techniques that you can use when you notice these things. I am going to create a blank layer in between this darkening level up here. I am going to turn that off in fact. And just create a blank layer and get with my brush. I am going to sample a nearby color over here. Maybe this medium brown, I am going to paint it over this area, I am going to change the blending mode to darken and lower the opacity a bit and then turn this back on to see if that does look better.

So you got rid of that one little afraid area. So play with your blending modes and opacities to get the type of thing that you want. Now this is our lightning levels layer. I am going to come back in here with the smaller brush to just bring that up again, reveal and highlight X key that is an existing one. I am going to extend it out maybe like this. You can kind of see how it looks like a cone, it is darks at a little whiter at the base and then it is getting narrower as it is going up. So you have just to play with it till it gets a look that you like. And that looks good.

Okay. Now I am going to merge some of these layers as you add layers to your file, you will notice down here in the document status bar that it gets bigger. So if you want to free up some of your RAM, your random access memory so things work a little quicker. You can merge layers as you go. Now I want to preserve my background layer in order to show you before and after. And you may want to preserve all your layers just to have as a reference to read them. But this is a copy file to begin with so I know I am not overwriting my original file.

This is my edited file but I am going to highlight the very top layer and then come down here holding shift, down to the hair patch one layer. And when I do this I am going to merge them all into one layer without preserving any of these working layers but I am preserving the background layer because I do not have that highlighted. If you go to the layers pallet fly out menu, you can see a command for merge layers. And that is going to merge the selected layers.

If your previous versions of Photoshop, you want to link this layers and then use the command and find in here. Now when I do that it kind of change the appearance out here. And that is phenomenon that happens when you have a group of layers and some of them use various blending modes. So I am going to undo that and show you how to get it to look just like you see it here.

And we will do that simply by clicking on the new layer icon and all we have to do is go select all there is a couple of ways you can do this. This is one so, we select all and then we say Edit, Copy Merged, and then we go Edit, Paste and it is going to paste into that blank layer and you can see when I shut the visibility on or off there is no change and that is taken a picture of it and pasted it there using the blending modes.

Now we can come back and click Shift click and drag all this to the trash and we have simple two layers, it has reduced our working file size so we have before and after.

So at this point I had a question for cleaning up stray hairs and it is quite easy to do on this image because it a solid color background. What you do is just create a new layer with an airbrush again, if you want to Alt or Option click the background color and start out by lowering your opacity of your airbrush and just start painting, painting away. You do not want to get too perfect around the hair and leave a couple of little stray so it looks real but we can get rid of this mess down here just by painting over it a couple of times.

Now the interior, it is a little different and that will create a new layer and we will use—we will try the spot healing brush. If you do not have the spot healing brush you can use the regular healing brush with the sample all layers option check. And we are going to come in here and make the diameter are brushed. So that it extends some of the area that is in proximity to the area we are going to heal and have proximity match checked up here in normal blending mode. And sample all layers.

And just drag a little bit and release. And you can see what this does and is eliminates the Option, Alt source step that is used in the healing and clone stamp tools but sometimes it does not work like that. That is still left a little bit of a line there. I will try increasing the diameter a bit and putting the hair in the middle and dragging a little bit and that got rid of it. And we will come over here to the side here and do the same things just drag up turns dark the one you release it blends that area in. It clones the proximity in over the area that you are brushing that is different. Up here under the brow click and release, click and release, I just want to make sure when you are doing this it is preserving the texture.

Now this, create a little smear so, the handy Ctrl+C on a PC, Command C on a Macintosh to undo it. You might can try again with this tool or you can go and get your healing brush tool and I am going to go in here and just switch that angle a little bit, make it a little smaller, source this area right here and come in click and release, click that area.

Now I want to show you something here. Say I sourced this area right up here near the brow but I started down here away from the brow and move upward. Look where the cross areas and when I release it left like little smudge but did not get the color. That is the nature of the healing brush. It will do some of the texture but it will blend with the color beneath it where as if I had used this cloned stamp tool and done the same thing. Let me make that a little bit smaller and source up here close to the brow and come down here. It is going to actually source it without a blend. So just be aware of the properties of these tools and use them in combination with one another.

So now I am going to zoom out and all of this are in normal blending modes so, I will be able to highlight them all and do a simple Ctrl+E to merge them without any change in the appearance. So, only when they blending modes that you have to do that other method. So there we have before and after. One more detail that you might want to do is a sharpening on this just to pop that highlight a bit.

So let us do a Ctrl+J or copy then we are going to come in here Image Adjustments desaturate, filter, other high pass at 10, change the blending mode to overlay add the mask, holding down Alt or Options so it is hide all mask and with the regular airbrush white is a foreground, brush in some of this for detail here. And then I want to add a little on the earrings too maybe on the lips and experiment with the blending modes. Overlay, soft like it is going to be too soft. Try hard light that pops up a bit, vivid light and linear light.

I think I am going to go with vivid light there is before and there is after and that is about it for this hair image. We will Alt or Option click on the background to turn this layers off to look at the before image that had the gaps in the hair. The straight hair is out here and the straight hairs on the face and Alt or Option click to show the after.