How to Change Hair Color in Affinity Photo

have you ever wanted to give yourself a new look maybe you've always wondered what you would look like with pink hair well today i'm going to show you how to change hair color in affinity photo if you follow along with the steps that i teach you today you'll be able to switch up your look in no time let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me you can download this image in the video description i'm excited to show you how to change hair color today because i found a really cool technique that will allow you to change the hair color no matter what color you start with it actually doesn't matter if you're starting with black hair blue hair or red hair using this technique will help you to change any hair into any color as we go through this video i'm going to show you how to give this woman black hair blonde hair and a fun color we'll start with black because that's the easiest to achieve the very first step to any of these hair color transformations is actually the really cool technique that i mentioned before all you need to do is desaturate the hair by taking all of the color out of the hair we have a blank slate which is perfect because her bright red hair would have been hard to change so to desaturate i'll come to my adjustments and then select the hsl adjustment then i'll bring the saturation slider all the way down now i only want this to be applied to the hair so i'm going to invert this adjustment by pressing command or ctrl i now you can see that a black mask has been applied over this adjustment so i'll press b for my paint brush tool and then i'll make sure that i'm painting in white to reveal the hsl adjustment on the hair just make sure that you're painting with 100 opacity 100 flow and 0 hardness you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush as you go as i'm painting i'm going to avoid the flyway hairs for now and just focus on covering the main parts of the hair once i have the main parts of the hair covered i'm going to go in to do more detailed work with a smaller brush around the edges of the hair i know this part is a bit tedious but making a good mask of the hair is crucial to making this look realistic if you want more tips on making a good selection i've made an entire course on this which you can find in the video description for this tricky area over the face i'm going to lower the flow of my paintbrush so that my paint isn't going on as harshly up at the top of her head i want to gradually fade in this hairline so with my low flow paintbrush i'm just going to paint in white to gradually apply the desaturation at any point if you paint too much just press x on your keyboard to switch your color to black and then you can take away what you've painted all right with the main part of her hair done now it's time to focus on those flyaway hairs i tried not to paint too much over the flyways that have a lot of space between them i mostly focused on the more clumpy flyaways so for these little hairs that still have a bit of color to them i have a different strategy for this i want to desaturate them so i'll go ahead and apply another hsl adjustment then i'm going to select the red color channel and using the picker i'm going to sample this red color then watching this area i'm going to desaturate and then move around these color sliders to try to better target that area without affecting the background color you can see that the more i push this slider the more red becomes visible so i'm just going to bring that down and while the yellow color did change slightly it's not quite as extreme so i think this should do a pretty good job i'll close out of this and then invert this adjustment by pressing command or control i now that we've isolated that area i can go ahead and press b for the paintbrush tool make my brush quite a bit larger and then i can just paint over these flyaway hairs you can see the before and after by desaturating them or getting rid of that red color i'll go ahead and increase my flow to make this faster all right there we go here's the before and the after of adjusting the flyaway hairs this is going to make a big difference as we go through and change the coloring of the hair i do want to point out that we still have this tricky area of hair going over her face since the hair is red as well as the skin underneath it's pretty tricky to fix this area so we'll just keep an eye on it as we begin to change the coloring and now that i've zoomed in i can see that on our first layer i accidentally painted over the ear a little bit so i'll just switch my color to black to paint over that alright now that her hair is desaturated we can take this image and turn her hair to black blonde and any other color to make black hair the next step is to darken the hair to do this i'm first going to take the original selection that we made of the hair and load that as a selection so i'll press command or control and i'll click on that first hsl adjustment so that most of her hair is selected then i'll come down to my adjustments and i'll apply a curves adjustment because her hair is a selection as i darken this curve only her hair will be affected now that her hair is black my next step is to add some shine i'm going to add a new pixel layer and then using this pixel layer i'm going to paint in white over her hair so with my paintbrush tool selected i'm just going to increase the flow all the way then i'll change my color to white and i'll paint all over the hair now i only want this white hair to be applied to the highlights of her hair not the dark shadows so i'm going to come over here to the gear icon and then i want to keep the highlights node up so that it's applied to the highlights and i'll bring down the shadows node so that our shadows can peek through the hair her hair is also looking a bit gray so i'm going to bring this over about a quarter of the way this looks pretty good but to soften this look even more i'm going to change the blend mode of this layer to soft light so far this is looking great as a final step i want to add a little bit of dark brown to the hair right now because the wall behind her is yellow it's actually making this black hair look a bit blue so to make this more realistic i'll go ahead and hold down command and click on this layer again then i'll select a nice dark brown color and i can go ahead and paint that over the hair on a new pixel layer now we can go ahead and change the blend mode to soft light soft light is definitely my favorite blend mode to use when adjusting hair colors it just keeps things very soft and natural then i'm going to lower the opacity if we want to add even more brown to this we can duplicate this pixel layer if we'd like by pressing command or control j i'll press command or control d to deselect and then we can see how this is looking i'll select all of the layers that we've done so far to see the before and the after and there we have it we've now made beautiful black hair alright are you ready for a tougher one we're going to make her hair blonde so the first thing i'm going to do is select all of these pixel layers by holding down shift and clicking then i'm going to group them by pressing command or control g then i'll turn off this group so now we still have all of that saved if you want to make her hair black again but for now i'm going to make her hair a lot lighter to start i'm going to double click on this curves adjustment now this curves adjustment made her hair darker originally so if we move this curve upward we can see that we're making her hair a lot lighter be careful not to raise this too much or the hair will start to lose its shadows and start to look like it's glowing so just raise it a little bit then i'm going to hold down command and i'll click on the curves adjustment so that i can have a selection of the hair and you can do this at any time where you don't have the hair selected just hold down command or control and click on any of the layers where you've painted over her entire hair so next i'm going to add another pixel layer and i'm going to paint in white over her hair this will lighten the overall hair one more time i'm going to change the blend mode to soft light and then i'm going to go over to the gear icon and bring down the shadows node again all right now it's time to add some color for blonde i'm first going to add a new pixel layer and then choose kind of a peach color to start because the silver hair looks blue adding peach which is the opposite will neutralize the situation we have going on then i'll change the blend mode to soft light you can see that this looks more platinum blonde than the gray we had before and as i go i don't want to lose my shadows so i'm also going to click on the blend ranges and i'll bring down that shadows node then we can add more and more layers to get the color just right this time i'm going to add more of a yellow color and i think that's looking pretty good so i'll duplicate it then i'm going to darken it just a bit with a bit of a darker gold color i also want to make the shadows look nice and dark brown because right now this is looking pretty flat i'll add another pixel layer and then choose a nice dark brown color and i'll paint this over the whole head then i'll change the blend mode to soft light and going up to the gear icon i'll go ahead and take this away from the highlights you can see how this has made the shadows areas look a lot better i also want to make the hair look darker at the top since that's how hair naturally grows darker first and then it lightens with the sun over time so i'm going to add another pixel layer and choose a very dark brown color then with a low flow i'm going to paint this more harshly at the top of the head and then i'll very gradually bring it down then i'll change the blend mode to soft light so it blends in with the hair and you can see what a difference that has made by making the top a lot darker this is adding so much more dimension feel free to keep adding as many layers as you want to get this color exactly how you want it i'll press command or control d to deselect and then i'll select all of these layers to see the before and the after of making this woman into a blonde it definitely takes a lot of practice and time to get the color just right feel free to reference photos on the internet of people with blonde hair to try to get this color looking not too yellow or green and get it looking more of a golden color now as the last option i want to show you how to make fun colors with the hair once you have the hair blonde like this it's actually really easy just select the hair by holding down command or control and clicking on one of the layers where you painted over the entire head then add a new pixel layer i'll go ahead and bring that to the top and then you can choose any color you want then just paint it in i'm going to increase the flow once you have the color you can change the blend mode now if you'd like you can choose soft light which is the blend mode we've been using the whole time but i also want to show you that there are a few other blend modes you could use like overlay hue or color i'm going to stick to soft light for now but i just wanted to show you that you have other options you can play with now i'll just deselect so that we can see our beautiful pink hair i know that in this video there was a lot of steps and options that you could use to get the hair looking just right to simplify things i've put together a handy little checklist which you can find in the video description it walks you through how to darken hair and how to lighten hair feel free to use that as needed great work my friends this was a really fun video to make and i hope you have fun giving yourself a beautiful new hair color if you want to learn our affinity workflow then check out the free course below you

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 29,274

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, hair, color

Id: qm7UYAQbb3M

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020