In beauty, fashion, wedding, and portrait retouching, faces are usually the key focus for retouching, but the significance of the hair for the final image cannot be underestimated.
While retouching hair is often viewed as a tedious task, a skilled hair retouch makes a tremendous difference, contributing to a polished editorial or commercial result. It is a skill that is necessary if you are a freelancer, and even more so if your goal is to work with commercial clients in the beauty and fashion industry.
Although an experienced hairstylist greatly contributes to the initial capture during the photo shoot, the responsibility for ensuring flawless hair in the final images still falls on the retoucher. And while some techniques for skin retouching are applicable to hair, the challenges and approach differ significantly.
With this video course, you will learn how to fix common hair issues in beauty, portrait and fashion photography using simple retouching tools and techniques. It offers a variety of tactics and methods to help you take the struggle out of the process, save time, and streamline the process. In some lessons, we will show you alternative methods for tackling common hair retouching issues so that you can always choose what works best for the image at hand.
This course requires some basic knowledge of Photoshop tools, layers, adjustment layers, blending modes, and masks. However, we do provide additional details for the tools used in the lessons as well as the layered PSD files, so you can easily apply the same concepts to your work.
If you are completely new to retouching, check out our Retouching Jumpstart video course.
This isn’t a course to teach you how to completely transform the look of the hair in an image – the market for that type of hair retouching is incredibly narrow, so those skills, as well as the time- and labor-intensive work are rarely required. This means the amount of time you need to invest into mastering that type of tedious hair retouching would likely have a minimal return on the investment in the long run.
On the contrary, this course is designed to help you learn to tackle the common challenges that you will often encounter in the beauty, portrait, wedding, and fashion genres of photography.
PRACTICE IMAGES
Along with the video course, you will download a few images in the form of layered PSD files. These images were photographed by Michael Woloszynowicz & Julia Kuzmenko exclusively for the Retouching Academy students.
In the enclosed PSD files, we preserved the layers that Michael created at the time of the recording, so you can analyze them and practice along the way.
We encourage you to retouch these images completely and share the results in the Retouching Academy Group on Facebook for peer and pro feedback, and/or on your social media tagging Julia, Michael or @retouchingacademy.
BONUS MATERIALS
We have also included the custom brushes and actions that Michael uses in the video lessons:
- RA Hair & BG Brushes.abr – our custom brushes for background work and drawing in hair strands in focus and slightly out of focus;
- RA HR Custom Actions.atn – our custom actions that will set up the necessary layers for your Dodging & Burning and Frequency Separation work.
The talented photographer, retoucher, teacher, and author of our Master Dodge & Burn & Color Grade video courses, Michael Woloszynowicz, is back to share everything he does with hair in post-production in his editorial and commercial beauty, portrait and fashion images.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Intro: TYPICAL CHALLENGES AND COURSE OUTLINE
- Typical Hair Retouching Challenges, Course Overview, Images
Lesson 1: CLEANING UP THE OUTSIDE PERIPHERY OF THE HAIR
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Video 1.1 Removing Hair in Bulk
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Video 1.2 Drawing in Hair Strands
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Video 1.3 Adding Noise
Lesson 2: CLEANING UP THE INTERIOR OF THE HAIR
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Video 2.1 Strays Crossing Face
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Video 2.2 Interior Hair Removal: Using Spot Healing Brush
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Video 2.3 Strays Crossing Hair
Lessons 3-5: ADVANCED OUTSIDE PERIPHERY CLEANUP
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Video 3 Outside Edge Cleanup: Grafting Hair
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Video 4 Stray Hairs Cleanup: Brute Force Method
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Video 5.1 – 5.3 Advanced Outside Edge Grafting
Lesson 6: INTERIOR HAIR GRAFTING
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Video 6.1 Covering up Revealed Scalp
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Video 6.2 Filling Gaps Against Background
Lessons 7-10: DODGING & BURNING; COLOR CORRECTING & SHAPING HAIR
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Video 7 Dodging & Burning for Hair Retouching
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Video 8 Color Correcting Hair Shade Inconsistencies
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Video 9 Dodging & Burning to Contour Hair
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Video 10 Shaping Hair
Lesson 11: ADVANCED HAIR REPAIR: CLEANING UP FOREHEAD & REMOVING BABY HAIR
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Video 11.1 Grafting Skin to Cover Up Baby Hair
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Video 11.2 Using Frequency Separation to Clean up Forehead
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Video 11.3 Fine-Tuning the Results Achieved in the Previous Two Videos
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Video 11.4 Refining the Appearance of the Created Hairline
Lesson 12: WIG HAIRLINE REPAIR
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Video 12 Using Frequency Separation and Other Tools to Improve the Appearance of Wig Hairline.