Changing the hair color of somebody is one of the easiest things to do in Photoshop. Lots of people do it, like in the fashion, portraits and product photography and it looks very realistic! You can use any version of Photoshop, I am using CS4 and do not plan on upgrading for a long time.
1. Open It
After opening your photograph, click the Q button on your keyboard, or click on the Quick Mask Mode, shown in the image below. This will allow you to color pretty much everything.
After that, select the Brush Tool (B) and make sure it’s set to Soft Mechanical Brush, because you want soft edges.
2. Changing Hair Color
Start coloring your subject’s hair and it will automatically turn red, so don’t freak out. You’re just telling the program which parts to change later. Select smaller brush sizes and zoom in if you’re dealing with plenty of hair.
If you accidentally color the wrong part, just press Control + Z (Edit>Undo) and you’ll be back, like nothing has ever happened.
Once you are done, click on the Quick Mask Mode again to disable it. Your colored part will now be selected like this;
Open the image if you can hardly see anything. If you have followed all of the steps above, you should be here too!
Here comes the hardest part. You need to go to Select>Invert otherwise, everything but the hair will change its color. That’s something we don’t want, right?
Now press Control + U, which will open a small window where all of the magic happens! Slide the Hue bar left and right, and watch how the hair changes! Once you have the color you want, go to Image> Adjustments >Contrast/Brightness if you want to control it even more.
All you need to do now is to go to Select>Deselect and you can save the image! That’s it, pretty easy right?
