Photoshop: free your hair - how it works

In this guide, we show you how to crop a person's hair in Photoshop.

Trim hair in Photoshop

You can cut out the hair of individual people using the channels. This guide applies to Adobe Photoshop CS6:

1. Open the desired image in Photoshop in which you want to crop the hair and make a copy of the image layer.
2. Select the copy of the layer and click on "Channels" in the layer overview on the right.
3. Hide all channels except the "Blue" channel and make a copy of it.
4. Select "Corrections" under "Image" and click on "Graduation Curves". Move the slider to the right via "Enter" so that it is approximately in the middle of the bar.
5. If you can still see parts of the face, use the brush tool to paint them over with black paint.
6. Under "Image" and "Corrections", click "Invert". Alternatively, you can also use the key combination [CTRL] + [I].
7. Hold down the [CTRL] key and click with the left mouse button on the blue channel.
8. Switch back to the level overview and click on the level with the original image. The selection of the hair is retained so that you can now copy it with the key combination [CTRL] + [C] and paste it as a new layer with [CTRL] + [V].

In the next practical tip we will show you how you can create 3D objects and animations in Photoshop.