Hair Tutorial for Photoshop 7.0

Written by Frank Lopez
Originally written on October 22, 2002
Posted on July 7, 2006

Requirements
Photoshop 7.0

This is a quick and easy way to make hair in Photoshop. I don't know if it's actually the simplest way or the easiest because I just stumbled onto it by accident. It's a quick and hopefully to the point tutorial done in Photoshop 7, one of hopefully many Photoshop tutorials to come.

First step is to start up Photoshop.

You're going to start a new image and make it 200x200. Remember this only a sample to get you started.

Next you'll want to click on the Paintbucket Tool with whatever color you want to make the hair. I chose yellow because it's a bright and purty color.

Now choose a black color and click on the Brush Tool. You'll wan to change the brush size to 1px so that we get the thinnest lines possible. If you don't know how change the brush size then look at the image below. Adjust the Master Diameter bar to the far left to change it to one. Make sure it's a solid brush.

Draw lines all across your image in an angle. It doesn't have to be perfect. Look at mine for God's sake.

Select the Burn Tool next. It's the little talking hand icon that you see on the bottom left. If you don't see it then right click on the Dodge Button or Sponge then click on it to select it. You'll want to make sure the Brush Size is 90, Range is highlights, and Exposure is 60% You can always change this of course to experiment, but for now let's set it to this.

Darken the middle and the sides in a cross angle like so. Just start clicking away and hurry, I don't have all day. Just make it look roughly like the picture below.

You can add a render light to hightlight the bright spots but we're not going to do that now. You can if you want.

Right now you'll want to add some noise. I have it set at 20 for the the amount. You go to Filter > Noise then click on Add Noise.

Next you'll click on Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and set the angle acordingly lined up with the angle of the black hair lines. Set Distance to 15 pixels. Again, you can do more or less if you want to experiment a little, but for now it's 15 pixels for you and me.

Basically, that's it, you're done. Look at your results. It should look like hair. You can actually go further and add some lighting from here like so. Just go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. Just set parameters like I have them below. You can always experiment with them and change some of those parameters around to see what results you get.

You might get some results like I did. After you add the lighting, add another Motion Blur at the same angle you had it at before.

You can make it look more detailed if you add more black thin lines. The more the better if you want a more realistic approach. You can also try using the Dodge Tool to add a little white highlight to keep your color from being too bright or too dark if you chose a dark brown. You might get some good results. Here's what I got for the final experiment.

It works well no matter the angle you use, so just play around with it a bit. When you add the motion blurs, make sure it goes according to your angle. I'm sure you'll get better results than I did.

There you have it. You can add more or take out some stuff or add some lighting effects here and there. So there you have it.

Any questions you can email me at thornbird73@yahoo.com.

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