Painting hair, can be one of the most challenging things to do. This tutorial will attempt to give you some basic guidelines and techniques that I have found to be helpful. There are many different tutorials out there, each one of them showing a little different technique, many of which I have personally used. After practicing all of them, I eventually came up with my own technique and what works best for me, giving me the results that I am looking for.
You also need to have a Grahics Tablet such as a Wacom Tablet. I use the Intus 2, which integrates perfectly with Photoshop 7, in that you can use varied pressures, slants, tilts and fades with your pen. To my knowledge, this can't be achieved with PSP, unless they add this feature to their newer version that at the date of this tutorial has not yet been released in it's final version. Using a mouse simply will not give you these results, as using a mouse delivers a constant pressure that you are not able to control ~ therefore you will need a Pen Tablet to do this tutorial.
This tutorial was written specifically for Photoshop 7 ~ and it is possible that you could achieve this in earlier versions of the program, if you know how to access and use the brush dynamics. Since I dont have that version of the program I can't tell you how it is done.
Before we start, you need to have a "hairbrush" to use. I have several different ones, some of which were freeware and some that I purchased at Renderosity, done by Eowyn ~ which comes with some color swatches and a tutorial as well. . DazedGraphics offers a great tutorial on hair painting, and they offer some free brushes. You might want to also give that tutorial a try. Perhaps you have a brush of your own you prefer to use, in which case...lucky YOU! Once you have your brush unzipped into Photoshop lets do some painting!
Here is the basic effect we are going to try to achieve with this tutorial. This is a finished image using the techinque we are going to learn, and what we are trying to achieve. The first image is without any postwork and the second one has been softened a little bit.
First open Photoshop 7 and open your Poser image that you are going to create the hair for. I normally start out with very large images, and find that zooming in on the image helps me to see the detail much better.
Assuming you saved your Poser image as a Tiff file, you will now be able to "load" just the Figure itself, by following these steps.
Once your figure is "selected" go to EDIT / COPY ~ and next open up a NEW Image on a Transparent Background, that is LARGER than the image you copied, to leave yourself room to draw the hair.
Now we are going to start adding Layers....so add 3 New Raster Layers
Stack your layers as shown below. The Bottom Layer (labeled Colored Background) is there for temporary use, so you can see what you are working on. It can be deleted later or a new color or fill put in there. It is important that you get your layers in the right order if you want your hair painting to work correctly. Since you have "copied" your image that you loaded from selection above, you can now go to EDIT/PASTE and put your figure image on the the layer shown in the illustration below.
Now set up your colors like this: Black for your background color and 34251E for your foreground color
Now select your BRUSH Tool
Now select your Brush Pallette and click on the little arrow (highlighted below)
And I clicked RESET Brushes to get the default brushes up and then picked the round brush size 13 ~ Depending on how large your figure image is, you may need to lower or increase this brush size for this part, by using the slider
Then I made sure my Opacity was set at 100% and Flow at 100% and Mode was set at Normal
Now I clicked on my "Toggle The Brushes Pallette" and made sure I was in the Expanded View ~ and chose Shape Dynamics and on the drop down menu I picked PEN PRESSURE
Next I made sure that my AIRBRUSH tool was ticked, and my Opacity was at 100% as well as my Flow being at 100%
NOW we have our tools, and colors all set up and we are ready to PAINT
~ Click the link below to continue ~
