How To Add Wind Blown Hair.

I had an amazing day! I found this perfect little watery nook to take photos at and I couldn't wait. I took my kids out after dinner for a shoot. I have so many treasures from today, but this is the first image I am editing. I wanted to start sharing my editing process. This is not ideal because I would very much rather have video, but I am having some technical issues rendering videos that I record with my screen capture. Once I get it figured out I will be able to do more complicated tutorials.

For this post unfortunately you will have to have at least a moderate understanding of Photoshop. If you can select, copy, paste and mask then you can do this.

The set up begins in the shoot. I took a static photo of my daughter sitting still. It is easier to get a nice facial expression. I find especially with kids as soon as things start moving their face goes with it! Once I got the base shot I stayed as much in the same position as I could (if you have a tripod even better).

My 9 year old son was my helper here... he grabbed the edge of the wig and at the count of 3 threw it up as I did a burst of shots.
You can get your model to throw their own hair if you have to, but because she was sitting in a tree I wanted her to hang on.

This makes it so easy in Photoshop to line up the background and really cut down on difficult selection and masking!

I opened the images I wanted to use in Photoshop, used the selection tool to select the piece of hair that I wanted and copied it and pasted it onto the base image. Since I am lining up the background this selection does not have to be exact.

Drag it over to the area you need it and start lining it up with where it needs to be. Once you are happy with the position add a layer mask and mask out the areas you don't need, then blend out the edges if you were like me and had a pretty solid cut line.

I had to repeat this process to get the tips of the hair from another image.

There I have it, wind blown hair.

When editing an image I do all of the composite work first. Putting all the pieces together first will help it look seamless later on. If they are like this shoot and the pieces are taken at the same time, same place, same camera settings it really is ideal. If you are a beginner at composite photography I highly recommend you start with a shot such as this!

Once I have all my pieces composited together I move on to any other edits that I want to do. She won't need any skin retouching but I would do that next, then dodging and burning. I would apply textures if I was planning on using them, I often do not, and then all my color adjustments happen at the end.

Now I am off to finish editing this image!