In this quick Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to change your hair color using a mask. You’ll learn to use the Quick Mask, the Hue/Saturation adjustment and the “Lighten” Layer Blending mode. The method we’ve outlined in this tutorial can be used for both strands of hair or for the entire thing.

We’re currently using Adobe Photoshop CS5, but this can be done in earlier versions of Photoshop just as well. We’ve toned down our result but you can use any color or intensity.

The Preview

1/3 Initial Preparations

Open your image (thank you, Captain obvious)

Before you start working on your image add a surface blur. To do that go to the “Filter” menu, “Blur” submenu and click on “Surface Blur…”

You can use the settings below. A small amount of blur will do. Click OK when you are done.

2/3 The Mask

Select Photoshop’s “Brush Tool” {}. The size of the brush depends on the size of your image, or on how much hair you want to color. Select a soft brush tip.

Click on the “Edit in Quick Mask Mode” {} button, which is located at the bottom of your toolbar, and then, using the brush, paint over the portion of hair you want to modify. You should end up with something like this.

Now click on “Edit in Quick Mask Mode” {} button again, to exit the quick mask mode. The result is a selection of the whole picture, except the parts you want to color. You should remember this as the tool is used a lot in Photoshop.

The next step is to select the hair only. In order to do that, go to the “Select” menu and click on “Inverse”.

3/3 Dye it!

To change the hair color in a non-destructive way, we will create a new layer from the selection. Press ctrl+c to copy the selection and ctrl+v to paste it in a new layer.

With your new layer selected, go to the “Image” menu, “Adjustments” sub-menu and click on “Hue/Saturation…”.

Play with the sliders until you have the desired color. Remember to check the Colorize button. We recommend choosing an intense color shade.

The last thing to do is change the blending mode of the newly-dyed hair to “Lighten”

Sonunda

Aaand, you’re done. You can play around with the options to get different results or you can use this method to dye entire hairdos. Sometimes, you may need to apply a small amount of Gaussian Blur to the colored layer.