Many of you are probably familiar with using clone and heal brushes to remove stray hair off the face or the background. What you may not do as much is clearing stray hair that is disrupting the main hair flow. Part of it is because it’s pretty time consuming and difficult.

Well, Natalia Taffarel posted an article on Model Mayhem on a technique she uses that cuts down on the difficulty. It is still a very manual and time-consuming process, but the result is a lot easier to achieve.

Retouching-Hair

Here are several things you have to do to achieve this:

  • Create a new, empty layer
  • Change the blending mode to Darken
  • Pick Stamp tool and have it sample All Layers
  • Change the Stamp tool’s brush mode to Darken
  • Clone near the stray hair and brush over the stray hair

The Darken blending mode makes it so that it only affects the typically lighter stray hair and not affect the darker main hair below. Of course, you can always use the Undo if you sometimes don’t get the desired effect.

Check out Natalia’s video to see this in action:

 

Also, take a look on this tutorial: