Photoshop Painting Techniques: Hair and FurUsing advanced Paint Engine functions to create custom effects By Dave Nagel
If you haven't already, you will at some point in your design career be forced to composite hair or fur into a project. The specific reason isn't important. But how are you going to do it? Use a plugin? Not any of the ones I've seen. Copy and paste hair from another image? Too much of a pain, what with the complex masking and color matching. So what will you do, paint the hair follicle by follicle? Absolutely. But it isn't anywhere near as time-consuming as it sounds. With the tools available in the Photoshop 7 Paint Engine, you can generate hair and fur with as much detail as you like in almost no time at all.
In the olden days, there weren't any really great ways to create hair and fur effects. But Photoshop 7 will allow you to design your hair strand by strand and generate a highly complex effect with little effort. The example below took maybe a half hour from shoot to final composite.
This kind of scraggly beard style isn't the only effect you can create with this technique, but it is a good starting point for getting you to understand how something like this can work in Photoshop 7.
Creating your brush tip and setting dynamics
If you're not familiar at all with Photoshop 7's Paint Engine, this tutorial is going to give you a little insight that will make you wonder how you ever got along without it. If you don't want to create this brush yourself, you can wait until I post my collection of hair and fur brushes next week. But for the more adventurous among you, here's how you do it.
To begin with this particular example, we first need to create a new brush tip shape. Create a new document with a transparent background. Select a dark gray color swatch, and then switch to the Brush tool and select one of the preset brushes--the "Hard Round 3 Pixels" brush in this case.
Draw some squiggly lines that overlap. Make sure you make at least one of the lines fairly long, and be sure to make them curly. If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, vary the stroke width by easing off the pen. Getting this brush tip shape just right may tale a little time, but you will get there with just a few tries. Here's the squiggle I've drawn for this example, and it's the only one I've used in creating the sample image above.
Now choose Edit > Define Brush, and give your brush a name. Now your custom brush is stored in the Brushes palette. Open it up and select the new brush (if it isn't already selected) to get a gander at it.
Now, if you were to start drawing your hair effect at this point, it would look just terrible. So what we need to do is to go in and start messing around with the brush's parameters.
First, in the Brushes palette, select Shape Dynamics. Switch off your Size control, and boost up your Angle Jitter. I'm putting mine at 20 percent, but you can go higher to create a more random appearance.
No go into Color Dynamics. Here you should boost up the Hue Jitter, Saturation Jitter and Brightness Jitter. You do this to avoid creating even hair/fur tones and to help the individual strands of hair to stand out in the final effect.
Finally, go into Other Dynamics and set the Opacity Control to Pen Pressure. (If you plan to do a lot of painting in Photoshop or any other graphics program, it's really in your best interest to invest in a Wacom tablet. They start around $100 new, so definitely go out and buy one.)
Now, to make this new brush with the specific settings a permanent member of your brush collection, select the flyaway menu on the top right of the Brushes palette, and choose "New Brush" from the list of options. Name it, and you're ready to start painting.
If you have trouble getting around some tight areas (like the mustache region), you can adjust the size of your brush down in the Brushes palette using the Master Diameter control.
When you've build up the base completely, select a dark brown from your Swatches palette, or sample one of the dark areas of your subject's (real) hair, and build up a new layer of color over the existing black.
Now, you guessed it, select a light brown, and build up the beard further. This is the stage where the details of the beard really start to pop out.
Then take a light gray, and fill in some gray hairs using very light pressure.
When you're done, go back in and fill in some more dark colors to replace details you might have lost along the way. And, while you're at it, switch to the Eraser tool, select your new brush, and erase away some of the stray hairs you've created. Using this brush with the Eraser tool will allow you to cut back into your image with the same edge quality as your hair layer, so it will blend more naturally.
Finally, switch back to your Brush tool and create a new layer. This layer should be given the Color Dodge blending mode in the Layers palette.
Select a light brown color, and on this new Color Dodge layer, start drawing lightly along the edge of your image to produce highlights.