Mama’s Hair Color

Root-a-ment-hairies!

Hi! This is Mama Shan, with the video tutorial to show you some rudimentary of hair coloring. You can download this image from my web site or open up the similar image where you want to fix the root color in the hair.

First thing we are going to do is select the Lasso Selection Tool. Click on that, and just drag a rough selection around the dark roots. Do not worry; it does not have to be perfect. Once the selection is running, come over to the bottom of the Layers Pallet, and click on the Add Fill Adjustment icon, that black and white circle and choose solid color. This will open up the color picker, and we will fill that selection with the default color selection. With the color picker open, move your cursor into the Image Window. It will automatically change to an Eyedropper and select by clicking in a lighter hair color area. So it changes that selection to that color. Click Okay.

Now, in order to get this selection to blend better, we need to change the blending mode which we are going to do in the Layers Pallet. In this layer, notice how what we had selected has formed the area of the mask that is being revealed. That white area is revealing that solid color. Go up to the normal tab which has a blending mode, and click on that, and come down and choose soft light. So you can see that this is blending better into the underlying pixel layer.

Now in order to get rid of this hard edge here, what we are going to do is add a Gaussian Blur to the mask itself. So make sure that the mask thumbnail is highlighted and it says, Layer Mask in the Title Bar. Go under the top Filter Menu, to blur, Gaussian Blur, and just select an amount so that it softens those edges and you do not see the harsh lines and just click Okay.

Now we can further adjust the color. Now that we have the selection in the revealed area, by double clicking on the layer thumbnail, this little color swatch, double click, that opens up the color picker. You can click in this area to change the brightness of the color. You can also use the gradient slider if you want to tone it a little differently. I am going to move it down to a little bit more red, adding a little bit more red in there. Make it blend a little better and when you are satisfied click Okay.

Now, if you want to also brush in some of that color, just get a soft airbrush, choose the Brush Tool. And then on the Top Options Bar, click on the downward triangle, and scroll down until you find an airbrush soft type of brush. I am just going to click on airbrush soft round 45 and use the right square bracket key to make it larger. And when you have white as the foreground color, and you are on that mask, it is going to reveal that color in the areas that you are clicking. If you click in an area that you do not want to click in, just press the x key, and that will switch to black, to erase that area or mask it.

Now if you need to make it overall lighter, you can duplicate this color fill layer just by pressing Ctrl J on a PC or command J on a Macintosh and then tweak it by lowering its opacity. So that it is going to give you an effect that you like.

Now let us scroll down here. So we have got this second duplicate layer at 31%, this layer at 100%, and that looks pretty good. And we will Alt Option click on the background layer to look at the before and the after. And that pretty much does it for hair color root-a-ment-hairies. Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.