Making a Beard

Photoshop Painting Techniques: Hair and Fur
Using advanced Paint Engine functions to create custom effects
by David Nagel
If you haven't already, you will at some
point in your design career be forced to
composite hair or fur into a project. The
specific reason isn't important. But how are
you going to do it? Use a plugin? Not any
of the ones I've seen. Copy and paste hair
from another image? Too much of a pain,
what with the complex masking and color
matching. So what will you do, paint the
hair follicle by follicle? Absolutely. But it
isn't anywhere near as time-consuming as
it sounds. With the tools available in the
Photoshop 7 Paint Engine, you can
generate hair and fur with as much detail
as you like in almost no time at all.
In the olden days, there weren't any really
great ways to create hair and fur effects.
But Photoshop 7 will allow you to design
your hair strand by strand and generate a
highly complex effect with little effort. The
example below took maybe a half hour
from shoot to final composite.
This kind of scraggly beard style isn't the
only effect you can create with this
technique, but it is a good starting point for
getting you to understand how something
like this can work in Photoshop 7.
Creating your brush tip and setting dynamics
If you're not familiar at all with Photoshop 7's Paint Engine, this
tutorial is going to give you a little insight that will make you wonder
how you ever got along without it. If you don't want to create this
brush yourself, you can wait until I post my collection of hair and fur
brushes next week. But for the more adventurous among you, here's
how you do it.
To begin with this particular example, we first need to create a new
brush tip shape. Create a new document with a transparent
background. Select a dark gray color swatch, and then switch to the
Brush tool and select
one of the preset
brushes--the "Hard
Round 3 Pixels" brush
in this case.
Draw some squiggly
lines that overlap. Make
sure you make at least one of the lines fairly long, and be sure to make
them curly. If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, vary the stroke width
by easing off the pen. Getting this brush tip shape just right may tale a
little time, but you will get there with just a few tries. Here's the squiggle
I've drawn for this example, and it's the only one I've used in creating the
sample image to the right.
Now choose Edit > Define Brush, and give your brush a name.
Now your custom brush is stored in the
Brushes palette. Open it up and select the
new brush (if it isn't already selected) to
get a gander at it.
Now go into Color Dynamics. Here you
should boost up the Hue Jitter, Saturation
Jitter and Brightness Jitter. You do this to
avoid creating even hair/fur tones and to
help the individual strands of hair to stand
out in the final effect.
Now, if you were to start drawing your hair effect at this point,
it would look just terrible. So what we need to do is to go in
and start
messing around
with the brush's
parameters.
First, in the
Brushes palette,
select Shape
Dynamics.
Switch off your
Size control,
and boost up
your Angle
Jitter. I'm putting
mine at 20
percent, but you
can go higher to
create a more
random
appearance.
Finally, go into Other Dynamics and set the Opacity Control
to Pen Pressure. (If you plan to do a lot of painting in
Photoshop or any other graphics program, it's really in your
best interest to invest in a Wacom tablet. They start around
$100 new, so definitely go out and buy one.)
Now, to make this new
brush with the
specific
settings a
permanent
member of
your brush
collection,
select the
flyaway menu
on the top right
of the Brushes
palette, and
choose "New
Brush" from the
list of options.
Name it, and
you're ready to
start painting.
Painting the effect
The actual painting of a hair effect is a fairly simple process. For my example, I've created it in five steps using just two
layers. First, create a new layer above your background layer. Using the brush you just created, paint in a black base
for your hair.
If you have trouble getting around some
tight areas (like the mustache region),
you can adjust the size of your brush
down in the Brushes palette using the
Master Diameter control.
When you've build up the base completely, select a
dark brown from your Swatches palette, or sample one
of the dark areas of your subject's (real) hair, and build
up a new layer of color over the existing black.
Now, you guessed it, select a light brown, and build up
the beard further. This is the stage where the details of
the beard really start to pop out.
Then take a light gray, and fill in some gray hairs using very light pressure.
When you're done, go back in and fill in some more dark colors to replace details
you might have lost along the way. And, while you're at it, switch to the Eraser tool,
select your new brush, and erase away some of the stray hairs you've created.
Using this brush with the Eraser tool will allow you to cut back into your image with
the same edge quality as your hair layer, so it will blend more naturally.
Select a light
brown color, and
on this new Color
Dodge layer, start
drawing lightly
along the edge of
your image to
produce
highlights.
Perform any
masking and
compositing you
wish, clean up
anything that
doesn't look just
right, and voila!
Finally, switch back to your
Brush tool and create a
new layer. This layer
should be given the Color
Dodge blending mode in
the Layers palette.