How to Create Facial Hair in Photoshop

today I'm going to show you how to make facial hair in Photoshop hey guys and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you could find me on the all-new phlearn comm where we make learning Photoshop and photography fun and I'm excited about today's episode because I'm going to show you how to fake facial hair from scratch in Photoshop and this is super useful it's more useful than it sounds because if you're like me and you're a guy there's probably some areas of your face that facial hair just doesn't grow for me there's a Petric right here that there's just no saving me there's just it's never gonna grow there maybe I'll put Rogaine on my face if I ever want to grow my beard long but that happens and that pretty much happens to everyone so if you're taking a picture of someone and they have like little blotchy areas on their beard or whatever it is this is a great way you can fill that in and make it look a lot better when you're retouching or if this is just something you want to do for kind of like playing around time if you want to see what it would look like to give yourself a beard or a goatee or whatever it is or if you're a girl and you always wanted to know what you would look like with a mustache you can use this technique we're doing all of that alright let's get into today's episode cool so here's our image for today I believe it was a titled incredibly good-looking Latino man it's from Fotolia calm and we're gonna be filling in some areas here on on his beard I've just like this area here and we might even give him some more hair things like that down here so a couple things to kind of look for when you're gonna be creating facial hair first thing is that it's not all the same color we can see we've got some dark color over here looks a little bit closer to black looks a little closer to brown over here we've even got some kind of like some lighter hairs growing over here and then we're also gonna see like in this area you can see we have highlights on the hair as well so even if we have black hairs sometimes they'll hit the light and they'll kind of get a highlight on them so we kind of need to add all that stuff into our brush when we actually go to create these things in Photoshop we need to add all that variation in okay so let's go ahead and start off this is not going to be that difficult and I save me a lot of fun first thing I want to do is I want to create one single hair basically on on his face so let's go ahead and on a new layer I'm going to paint with a brush tool I'm going to let's right click here I'm going to bring my hardness up about eighty percent or so and we'll bring our size down you can also hold down there we go that's too big you can use the open and closed brackets as well to make your brush either larger or smaller all right and basically what I want to do here is just create like one hair that looks a little too thick all right something like that I'm just kind of I want to get the perfect hair that looks good alright so we've created the perfect hair now if I move use my move tool I can move it around and see like does it actually fit yeah it looks pretty good now keep in mind if it's like you know if I put it down here and I need to blur it I can always blur it after the fact that I put it down so I've got one perfect facial hair right now what are we going to do with this well I'm gonna make it a new layer underneath this layer so I'm going to hold ctrl or command and hit the new layer icon that makes a new layer underneath your current layer and let's grab our marquee tool we're gonna use the rectangle marquee I'm just gonna make a white box around this okay and we're going to hit shift delete there and I'm going to fill this with white there we go so now this is what we have let's just go ahead and turn off our snapping alright so this is what we have we have a white box and then within that we have our hair that's important because we're going to make this into a custom brush and whenever you do that you want to make sure you have a white background and that your brush is black okay so how do we actually do this well all we have to do is turn this area into a selection which we could just grab another selection from our marquee tool or I can hit controller command and click on this layer which that will turn any layer into selection so now we have a selection of this area so we're ready to turn this into a brush all right all we have to do is go to edit and then down here to define brush preset there we go and we can see there's a little preview of it it tells you the size it's gonna be 46 pixels and we're just going to call this facial hair all right there we go so let's deselect and then now we're going to grab our brush tool P for the brush tool and it should automatically load up the last rush you just created in this case it's the facial hair brush so let's create a new layer and see what's going on with this brush so if I click a few times we can see it it creates my facial hair brush if I click and drag there we go that's what our facial hair brush looks like so that's how we create the shape of the brush next we need to go into the brush preferences and really make it look like it's got the features of facial hair so let's go ahead and delete all those layers we don't need them anymore we already have our brush all right on a new layer and I'm going to do this over here we're going to open up like a test environment so right now this is what the brush tool looks like all right if I go to window and then down here to brush we're gonna get this great brush menu now in this brush menu we have a ton of options and I would really recommend spending some time kind of playing around in the brush menu because there's so many great things you can do here first things we're going to do I'm going to click on our shape dynamics we're going to turn this on and I'm going to turn my size jitter all the way up what this is going to do is it's going to make some of these larger and some of these smaller okay next thing we're going to do is I'm going to take my angle jitter and we're going to turn this up as well so this is going to make each one of these hairs is going to be at a different angle next we're going to turn our roundness jitter up as well and this is just going to add even more variation to these hairs because you can see each one of these hairs is not going to be the exact same right okay looking good so the next thing we want to do I want to kind of scatter these around right now like that hair doesn't actually grow like that right let's turn around nice jitter down a little bit there we go here doesn't actually grow like this that's not realistic so let's go ahead and turn on scattering and I'm going to turn on both accesses here so that way as I bring my scattering up you can see what happens is my hair just kind of scatters around very cool and we can change how much scattering we'd actually like alright let's go ahead and bring this up just a little bit more we're looking good so if I click and drag this down that's what it looks like and if I go to the right that's what it looks like there okay now the next thing we're going to do I'm going to go back to our shape dynamics and I'm going to turn where it says angle jitter I'm going to control it take this control and I'm going to put it to direction the reason I'm going to do that is now as I paint down what you're going to see let me just move this over here you can the hair actually goes in the direction that I'm painting if I go in this way it's going to go in that direction so basically based on the direction of my brush that's the way the hair is going to do now right now it's going perpendicular to my movement but if I go to my brush tip shape and I change this angle from 0 to 90 what's going to happen is it's going to go with the movement to my brush so I'm able to define which direction the facial hair actually travels then it's kind of cool you could totally like make someone's name out of this so now you can see I've got a lot more control than when I started out right I'm actually creating hair that like follows a path obviously you can see I'm having fun with this okay the next thing we're going to do is I'm going to turn on our transfer so the reason we're doing this is because let's go ahead and turn all this off I want to make some of these hairs more visible and some of these hair less visible all right some of these hairs let's turn on our opacity jitter up and what this is going to do is basically just what we said it's gonna make some of the hair more visible some of the hair less visible so it's just going to look a little bit more realistic okay and then almost on here bringing this down I can also flip this hair around so if I hit this X jitter some of these hairs are going to be going you can see all these are curving the same way right there kind of have this st. mark now flipping this extra door around some of them are going to be curving in one way and some of they are going to be curving the other way and if I wanted to do the Y jitter I can do that too okay now that's a lot a hair if you want even more hair bring your spacing down and what that's gonna do is just put a ton of hair right there if you want less hair bring your spacing up and that's going to give you less hair something that's a little bit more realistic alright so now it looks like we're pretty much ready to start creating this hair so probably not good just yet probably not perfect but I think we're on our way okay so now what we want to do is start painting our hair so on this layer we're just going to start painting in right where we want our facial hair to show up and you can see it should look pretty real now you're gonna have color variation and things like that in the hair so what I would recommend doing is because this is brush tool you can paint with any color you want I mean if I wanted to create like bright pink hair on this guy I could do that see it's just a regular brush tool about all right I don't want to do that but it is an option for you okay so what I would recommend doing is grabbing a brush tool and then stamp sampling a couple colors okay sampling these colors from the existing hair that's already there so you can see I've got like a dark brown right now and this is just getting like some nice hair that's that dark brown color all right gives it a little bit more that realistic look so we don't have just one color of facial hair because that's not how facial hair grows all right let's see what we're doing over here there we go paint some in over here you know what you can create new layers and you can use blending modes as well like a multiply blending mode is going to make sure that this hair makes everything darker alright you can make some of these brushes you could go a little bit smaller with your brush or you can go larger with your brush to just don't go too large or you get something like that there we go and now let's choose our brush tool and grab it another color it's a little bit darker this time alright and you can see I'm painting downward because we have control over where a brush goes remember it's going to follow the direction of my actual brush right so I'm painting downward if our paint left over right my brush is going to look like that so if I want you know the hair to look more realistic I'm actually like painted in the direction that the hair should actually go there we go this is looking really good actually not that I doubted that it would look good for a second because I knew it would but it looks good there we go alright so you can see I'm just kind of like painting in this facial hair wherever we want it now if you wanted a paint in stubble super easy just make your brush shape the size or the shape of stubble so in this we created the shape of our brush is one single hair but if you wanted stubble just make the brush shape look like stubble alright let's go ahead and group those layers and let's take a look the before and the after really quick pretty good now we talked earlier about adding some color variation as well as adding some highlights into what's going on here in the actual facial hair so let's go ahead and do that we're going to open this group up make a new layer in here and then this time I'm just going to paint with let's just paint with white right out so I'm going to paint with white and just paint a couple these hairs visible here and what this does you can see here you don't even notice it until I turn the layer on and off it just adds like what looks like highlights on on this hair so it makes it look a lot more realistic right rather than just having your dark hair or if you wanted someone to have gray hair you just paint a lot of this in I'm getting old my gray hair all right we won't do that I'm having fun obviously okay so this is a great way to actually fill in facial hair now let's say we wanted to actually make some facial hair that was you know a little bit more we want a sculpt now let's go back to our brush tool and I'm gonna bring our spacing down so we're gonna put more hairs per inch HPI in it into her brush and now we can start kind of sculpting this around there we go I made up HPI by the way he probably figured that out but just in case I looked up HPI everywhere on the internet I couldn't find any information about it what's what's the deal all right there we go so I'm just kind of grabbing some colors from the actual beard itself and here we're painting in some of the facial hair so you're gonna see it's not gonna look real until we create a new layer above it and then I paint with a highlight color over top of it alright let's just bring down our pasty a little bit there we go that looks good you know what I'm gonna bring up my spacing just a little bit because I don't need so many of the highlights in there and there we go that looks see how much more real that looks just giving it a little bit more of that definition there and I'm gonna race that guy right down there looked like it was going gray instead of highlights so this is how we could use it basically for some interesting facial hair and some topiary additions to the face all right so let's go ahead and take a look at our before and our after all right here's our before and our after alright guys that's it for today's episode I hope you enjoyed learning how to make facial hair super cool and simple to do and if you don't feel like actually making the brush yourself what you can do is just head over to phlearn com2 this episode page and download this exact brush that we made in this episode so you can just download the brush double click on it once you download it'll automatically open up in Photoshop and you got a facial hair brush that you can use on any one of your photos you're welcome wait if you like what we're doing here phlearn be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel where you can receive free photoshop & photography updates every single week as well if you have any questions about this episode or ideas for new episodes please leave it in a comment down below we'd love to hear from ya share share the phlearn share the phlearn with your friends yea do that thanks guys i'll phlearn you later I always thought phlearn should be pronounced in a foreign language like learn flirt and flirting at at flirt again good to meet you yeah flirt all over ya what's that coming out of your nose learn you and

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 4,021,206

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, custom brush, photoshop brush, facial hair, hairy man, attractive man, latino man, add hair, photoshop hair, Adobe Photoshop (Software), create hair, paint hair, airbrush hair, draw hair, course, class, learn photoshop, add beard, moustache, mustache, won't grow

Id: KG784oxeQcQ

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/theBMB]

Would be interesting to see this brush applied to a face that doesn't already have facial hair to see if it still looks appropriate.

[u/LegendaryOutlaw]

Great tutorial and channel. I've always just used the clone brush to add in hair, this is a much more realistic looking solution. Good find.

[u/[deleted]]

I just spent over an hour watching this guys videos because of this

[u/buddythebear]

Holy crap, this is great. I've been teaching myself Photoshop for the past few years now and if there's one thing I've found, so many tutorial videos are utter shit. I love how this guy explains things in a way that is great for novice/intermediate users like me, while still providing a lot of good info for more advanced and knowledgeable users.

[u/pawlesome]

So helpful. I don't work with a lot of facial hair, but I imagine I can use the same approach to add back skin texture.

[u/sthax9]

In the beginning part of the video he made a pink box line the layer and two guides pop up. Anyone know how he got the function?

[u/bondfool]

Phlearn. That's so fun to say. Phlearn, Phlearn, Phlearn.

[u/ARONDH]

Hair penis at 7:20

[u/merelyadoptedthedark]

That is shockingly good.