How To Make Selections In Photoshop Using Channels

This is a how-to cut out hair in photoshop tutorial. With channels in photoshop cc, you can make precise selections to cut out fine details.

How to Make a Selection

Here we have an image that’s got a lot of detail to it. And channels are pretty good at cutting something out with this detail. So in our Channels tab, we’re going to use just the blue channel. I’m gonna move a copy of the blue channel. To make a selection of a channel, you just hold down Command or Control and it has selected all the white or the light areas in the image. But we need to select the dark images, so I’m gonna go select Inverse and I’m gonna come back to the Layers panel. And I wanna show you how this is selected. So I’m gonna bring up a solid color adjustment layer. And by default, that was selected on black and you can see it made it a lot darker but I can change my slider here and make the lion’s face a little greener. So that is how you can use channels to make a detailed selection. So it’s good at that. Let’s do another example.

How To Cut Out Hair Using Channels

So since channels is one of the tools that you can make selections and make detailed selections and we’re gonna cut out this image and use this mainly for hair. So let’s see how channels does here. I’m going over to the Channels tab and I’m going to use one of these channels. Usually, you look for the channel that has the most contrast between the background and the image. And channels work best when you’re using it and the background is plain and it’s bright like in this case. So coming up here to Image, Adjustments, and Levels, you’ll change the black point and make the image darker and we can try and strike a balance with the mid-tones. We want to make this image darker in these areas but you have to observe the hair and make sure that you don’t get the hair, basically, you don’t fry the hair and it looks all distorted and everything. So get it as close as you can and we are going to refine this a little bit better. So let’s say OK. I’m gonna make a selection here and click Control or Command. Here’s our selection. Go back into Layers and hit the Add layer Mask. And we have our image here but what we really need is to invert the layer mask. So click Command or Control + I and as you can see, she’s cut out but there are parts of her face that are not, so we can refine that. So if I hold Alt or Option and click on the layer mask, I’m going to use my brush tool, B for the brush tool and I’m gonna put my brush on Overlay, bring up my flow a little bit. Make sure that I am painting with white and I’m going to go over the areas that need to be white. Now, this technique of having the brush on overlay, see how I can get on these edges and it’s not going past the edge. That’s because I have it on overlay and I am only painting where I need to. I’m not gonna paint too far towards the ends of the hair because there’s some of the background that needs to come through there. So now I have all of my layer mask nice and selected. So Alt or Option, click on the layer mask and she is cut out of the background. Now what we need to do is put a solid color adjustment layer below that just so that we can see how the hair is looking with any kind of a background. So I’m going to make a solid color adjustment layer and I am going to put that below the image that we just cut out. So you can see that there is some white fringing but that is kind of a characteristic of a lot of the cutouts that you’ll do with most tools.

How To Remove Fringing When Cutting Out Hair

So now we’re gonna go a little bit deeper into a couple of techniques to get rid of the fringing and kind of bring back the hair. So I’m gonna add a blank layer above the image that we just cut out and I am going to create a clipping mask so that it’s clipped to the layers below. I’m going to hit B for the brush tool. I’m gonna lower my flow a little bit. Change my blend mode to Darken. Sample some of the colors here. And just on the outside, not on the inside, just paint lightly and again, I’m gonna lower my flow a little bit more ’cause I just barely want to build up some of this. I’m gonna sample and paint in the hairs, sampling a little bit of the colors next to the areas and I’m doing this quickly, so when you do it, take your time. So I’m just trying to get on the outside. I’m trying to stay away from any of the hairs on the inside because we’re going to take care of those next and with the blend mode of the brush in Darken, and just barely getting the ends here, edges of her hair. You’ll say I’m doing this fast. Okay, so the other areas, I’m gonna create another blank layer and create another clipping mask, and this time I’m going to use the clone stamp tool. Make sure it’s on current and below. I still have a fairly low flow on Darken mode and I’m going to get in here, do some of the areas that maybe didn’t get selected well but with a low flow, I’m going to try and clone in some of these areas and I’m trying to sample the color that is close to it and the direction, filling in some of these areas. But that is the idea of the technique and again, you take your time, so just to go over what I did. One layer was to paint with the brush on the outside of the hair only and that is sampling color. The next layer was to use the clone stamp on darken and get the areas on the inside of the hair. So that is how you can use channels to cut our hair. And there are many different ways to do this but this is what channels can do for you. So all the selection methods in Photoshop work differently under different circumstances.