Advanced Subject Relocation, Hair and Fur

Written by Amatocianmonk
2008-05-19
Hopefully you read and enjoyed my last tutorial about Basic Subject Relocation. This tutorial is going to build upon the basics that were covered in that tutorial. So if you have any questions about anything that isn't fully explained here, go back and read that.
In this tutorial, we are going discuss how to relocate a subject when there is hair and fur. And i have picked the most difficult picture i could find to demonstrait this. This is the picture that i am going to be working with today.
There is alot of fur on the hood of the jacket, plus her hair is going out into the background. This was not a problem in the Basic tutorial because our subject's hair was not protruding into the environment.
Now there are some things that need to be done that are different from the Basic tutorial. We are going to be using the lasso tool again to select our subject. But what we are not going to do is to try and lasso every single fiber of hair and fur. That would take hours and hours and would deliver unsatisfactory results. The trick here, is to make your selection only in area's where the background is completely covered. keep your lasso in the areas where the fibers seem to make a solid.Hopefully picture shows you what i mean.


See how i am not going out onto the fibers with my lasso? Im keeping it to areas that have no background showing.

Once you have it all cut out, follow the steps in the basic tutorial to add your background. Leaving us with this.


Looks bad doesn't it?
Look specifically here:


It doesn't look realistic a tall.
The hero for this tutorial is the smudge tool.
Select your smudge tool [R] and set the brush size to about 3 or 4. Set the strength to about 84%-88%. Then click inside your subject layer and pull out. As you do this, you will create a very good fake hair.
A tip for this particular image is to drag out fibers for the fur first because it is behind the hair, then pull out the hairs.
You continue this around the head of your subject. When you are done, you should hopefully get something that looks realistic.

Here are some helpful tips:
- Try to follow the hair flow. That is, if your subject has straight hair like in this example, make straight long smudges. If they have hair that curls at the end, make curved smudges.
- Try to make the hair follow the same path that it was following when it hit the place where you cut. Meaning, if the hair is going down at a -82 degree angle, dont make your smudges go at a -45 degree angle... keep them the same as well as possible.



Here are some other pictures where i changed the background and had to do this with the hair.

Good luck!