If you ever had anything to do with image editing for advertising images, you know that rebellious hair can be an annoying task that will give you many headaches.

But tackling all the details and learning how to remove background from hair properly is an essential image retouching skill - especially if you want to build a portfolio.

So, if you don’t have a profound understanding of photoshopping or professional photography, you will find this article very helpful!

We’ll walk you through the process of removing background from hair and avoid ruining your eCommerce images. 

✅ Start by opening the image you want to remove the background from in Photoshop. Remember to duplicate your later, so you preserve the original picture. You will want a backup in case you need to start from the beginning. (CTRL+J)

✅ Click over the Eraser tool (Shortcut E)  and select the second option: “Background Eraser Tool.” 

✅ Then, click on “Sampling: Background Swatch.” Open the settings and adjust the size of the brush Hardness and Spacing to fit the kind of image you are editing. (For example: Size: 80 px, Hardness 80% and Spacing 1%).

✅ Don’t forget to select Limits to “Discontiguous.” Next, select “Tolerance.” To get Tolerance settings right, keep in mind that if your image has mostly light colors, you should choose something from 0-40%, and if you’re working with darker colors, select something between 40 and 80%. Typically, 50% is ok to use for both cases. 

✅ Next, select “Protect Foreground Color.”

✅ Then, go back to the Layers panel and make sure you are on the top layer. 

✅ Now that you’re all set up with the Background eraser tool, click on the area around the hair, remove the background as you usually do with the eraser tool, and keep erasing until you get the desired result.

✅ After you’re done, add a layer mask and get your transparent background as usual. 

✅ Make sure you have a color set as your Foreground color, then pick the rounded brush and paint over with the layer mask thumbnail in the layer panel. 

✅ Now, paint over the areas you want to hide.

The complexity of editing hair in image retouching comes from the fact that hair is almost transparent. So, when you automatically remove the background to get a transparent background, most tools will fail to create a realistic outcome.

That's why you need to be careful in applying a mask and paint the hairs one by one.

If you follow this technique, you will see that removing background from hair can be pretty simple and the results will be a professional-looking image. 

Try this better

If you want image editing services or are on the lookout for an automated background remover, give PixelPro.Ai a try!

It will help you do most of the work, even if you need to remove some hair manually on some occasions. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence can’t tackle all of the dynamics of human hair quite yet, but when it does, be sure we will integrate it.