What is the BEST METHOD for me to make a realistic selection of her hair?

Question

Hi You Guys!

Hoping someone can offer their advice. Judging from this photograph, what approach would you recommend as the CLEANEST method to isolate and make a selection of her hair? Especially the thicker, grouped strands and possibly a few loose strands. I am going to insert text behind her head, and I want the text to be partially covered by her loose strands of hair when I set it underneath in the layers palette.

I know that there are countless tutorials on YouTube covering this topic in-depth, but I'm really eager to see what any of your replies would be. Layer masking can be such a complex and daunting subject, so I'd appreciate if someone could break this down in an "A-B-C" manner. I am a photographer, this is a photo I shot of Vivica Fox.

I attached the full-resolution version of this photo, if anyone needs that to do a case analysis in Photoshop. Here is a web link to the full-resolution as well: https://www.werunhollywood.com/vivica.JPG

A huge thank you for any and all replies! Have a wonderful day!

Trevor.Dennis · Accepted Answer

That's a tough selection. What sort of background would you hope to use it against?

Dave Cross told us a story at MAX a few years ago about how he amazed Scott Kelby and the other Photoshop guys with what appeared to be an incredible selection. He fessed up that he'd manually painted in a lot of the detail a hair at a time. That's an approach I have also used for many years. I used to swear by the Skin and Hair brushes by Castrochew, but their are some other great brushes out there nowadays. Kyle Webster's Concept brushes has some excellent hhair presets for instance, from the Get more Brushes link in the brush panel.

My own goto brush for single hairs is 1 pixel fully hard with opacity set to Fade. (Value depends on brush spacing). Use this on a new layer whichh has it's opacity set to something like to 30 to 50%, but this depends on the image and background colours.

S_Gans · Answer

Hi. Looks to me like you have the benefit of a distinctive reddish tone on the strands of hair against the background.
My first approach would be to use the Red channel to isolate those most-difficult-to-select strands. Duplicate the red channel, then increase the contrast using a levels adjustment (NOT adjustment layer - use Layer>Adjustments) to isolate just those hairs and refine them.
From there, you can use all of the more common selection methods to mask away the rest of her, and just copy/Paste Special>paste-in-place for those hairs.

Good thing those hairs have such great contrast!

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