Hair is one of the trickiest things to retouch in portraiture. It’s organic, chaotic, and our eyes are incredibly sensitive to anything that looks unnatural. Get it wrong and the whole image falls apart.

Removing Flyaway Hairs

Flyaways are those stray hairs that catch the light and create distracting wisps around the head. Here’s how to handle them:

Against a Simple Background

If the background is solid or softly out of focus, the Clone Stamp is your friend:

  • Set to Current & Below
  • Use a small, soft brush
  • Sample background close to the flyaway
  • Paint over it in short strokes following the natural direction

Against a Complex Background

When flyaways cross over trees, buildings, or other subjects, cloning gets complicated. Instead:

  • Use the Healing Brush (Content-Aware mode)
  • Work in very short strokes
  • Or use Select and Mask to create a clean edge, then paint in background

The Pen Tool Method (for clean edges)

For the main hair silhouette:

  1. Draw a path along where you want the hair edge to be
  2. Convert to a selection with 1px feather
  3. Invert the selection
  4. Use Content-Aware Fill to replace the flyaways outside the edge

Adding Volume

Sometimes hair looks flat in photos, especially with overhead or flat lighting.

Dodge and Burn for Hair

Create your standard D&B gray layers and:

  • Dodge the natural highlight areas (where light hits the top of the head)
  • Burn the shadow areas (under layers, around the part)
  • Follow the natural flow of the hair

This adds dimension without changing anything about the actual hair.

Liquify for Shape

The Forward Warp tool at low pressure can nudge hair outward for more volume. Use it on a Smart Object so it’s non-destructive. Very subtle pushes — 5-10 pixels maximum.

The Hair-Background Edge

The transition between hair and background is where most retouchers struggle. The key is to never create a hard, clean edge. Real hair has some transparency and disorder at the edges.

After any cleanup work, check your edges at 100% zoom. If the hair outline looks like it was cut with scissors, you need to add back some randomness — a few wisps, slight softening of the edge, or reducing the opacity of your mask at the boundaries.

Natural-looking hair retouching is subtle work that takes practice. Start with simple cases and work up to complex curly hair and wind-blown styles.