So, you don’t want the background of your picture, but the damn actor has stupid bits of hair everywhere. You want to keep them, but get rid of the background. Understandable, so here’s how to do that.
Alright, this is much easier than you’d think. First, open up the image in photoshop. Duplicate your layer, so you’re working on the duplication, rather than your original image. Then pick the Quick Select tool, this one here.
Now select your image. Do the body first, then when you get to the hair, make sure you select all of the little bits. You’ll have to leave out some of the very thin hairs, but play with it. Remember, there’s the little button with the + sign on it, and use that to select more, and the one with the - sign to touch it up if you select too much.
Once you have the hair selected, hit the refine edge tool. On the little window that pops up, change the View Match to white on black, and then on the edge detection, check Smart Radius, and change the radius to 1px.
Then, leaving the window open, left click the edge of the hair on the photo, and drag along the hair. Do it a few times, just on the edge of the hair. It will look like this while you’re doing it.
Then, change your View Mode to on black, and if there are any little patches of the background, like I have on the right of his hair here, left click over that area.
Then hit OK, it should look something like this.
Then just hit Apply Layer Mask, that little button I’ve highlighted in red near the bottom right, and ta-da! You’re done!
Delete the original layer, and apply your new background. I gave Kit some snow, because I thought it would make him feel at home, and this was my result.
Apply some textures, and the whole thing should take about ten minutes. A lot faster than other methods, and it looks a lot better.
