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Basic Hair Retouching Tutorial

Hair retouching is probably the hardest part of beauty retouching. It needs big amount of time and patience to make it look realistic and beautiful. It doesn't matter how great your hair stylist is, hair wont stay on the place where you want it to be and you always need to retouch hair also to make the image look like as a finished artwork.
Here I show you the tools I have used for each part of the hair.
So we have this very messy hair here:

I put a ring around the messy areas what we need to remove or edit.

Click for bigger size

At first I usually use the spot healing brush with content aware on and remove the little flowing hair on the skin or background. (On the photo these are the areas with the number: 1)After that I want to edit/remove bigger areas and make the hair look softer so I click on Clone tool. Opacity around: 80% Flow around: 70%. (On the photo the area with the number:2) Play with it and use other parts always not only just one part where you cloning from because then it will look really fake and the same texture will be everywhere and you need to reclone it. So to save time be patient and dont be afraid of zooming in and out ALWAYS. This way you can see if it looks quite as good as a photo, not just a detail.

Later, when I finished cloning I am still not very happy with my image since the left side looks very messy so I click on the lasso tool and select the ares (pink ring around it on the photo) I want to copy there. I copy it and paste it into a new layer. All we need to do now is edit this hair part so click on CTRL + T (Command + T on Mac) and try replacing the old part with this new one. Erase the ares you dont need try to make it fit in. You can even use dodge and burn in this process and clone tool also.  (number:3) It looks better now but nite quite finished. As a final step I draw some little hair (number:4) with my paint brush with a very soft brush so hardness is 0% and opacity and flow are around 30-40%.
You also need change the brush colour for the lighter and darker parts so it looks natural. So now the hair looks lovely but we still need to do something: shade the hair. So Make 2 curves layers like we did when we retouched the skin. (one lighter than our original and one is darker, then invert the masks) and with a white brush around 20-25% opacity and flow start painting over the areas on the highlight layer what you want to be lighter and on the shadow layer what you want to be darker. 

Here is my before-after image:
Click for bigger size

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