A lot of people wonder how you can quickly and easily paint realistic hair in Photoshop. I'm going to show you my technique for painting hair, and even give you the brushes I created for this technique.

Download my hair brushes here. To install them, simply unzip the file and place the brushes in the Adobe Photoshop brushes folder. You can usually find that folder in programfiles/adobe/adobephotoshop/presets/brushes. Add the brushes to the folder before starting Photoshop.


There are two main concepts to learn here: colour sampling and building detail slowly.
The first step is choosing a hair style. I always work from reference. Always. Seriously, this will be the single greatest contributor to the amount of realism in your work. I can't tell you the number of times I have told someone their work 'doesn't quite look right'. More often then not, they do not have a references and are working off their memory. Bad idea. Google 'hairstyle' and find one you like.
I'm going to use this hairstyle:
It's time to block in the main shapes. Use the brush "hairblock" from my set and size it up or down based on your needs. You will need at least five different tones for this, and you can sample the colours from your reference photo to maximize the range of the tones.
Try to emulate the highlights and low lights and always paint in long flowing chunks. You should end up with something like this:Make sure to keep the part of the hair very dark. As you can see, I have painted a strip of dark brown right down the part. Also notice the pieces on the left side. One chunk of hair sweeps off horizontally, and I have pieces underneath it that start at the part and flow all the way down like this:Next we want to start breaking up these chunks and adding more variation. Use the brush "hair1" from my set and size it up or down to fill your needs. You're looking for the brush to be approximately the size of the chunks you've already laid down. Set your brushes opacity to %70 and make a new layer. Start brushing over the chunks you've already made while constantly sampling the colours for great variation (to sample colours, press 'alt' and click down on the canvas to sample a colour using the eye dropper). Every time you paint on your canvas with a semi-opaque brush, you will create a new colour. Keep sampling from these new colours and will get a lot of variation. You will still want to maintain the general tone of each chunk. You will end up with something like this:

I should mention from this point on, I'm only going to paint this one chunk (top left), to save time as I create this tutorial.
Make a new layer now and paint on the horizontal sweeping piece. This one sweeping piece should have its own layer as this will ensure your hair flows from root to tip.
Now switch to the brush 'hair2' which will create finer details. Make two new layers, one for the hair under the sweeping piece and one for the sweeping piece itself. Again, keep the brush on about %70 opacity and keep sampling colours while maintaining the general tone on the chunks. Make sure the chunks underneath the sweeping piece are a little darker to create the illusion of depth.
To add more detail, keep adding new layers and decreasing the size of the 'hair2' brush.

Now we're done painting the hair in clumps and we're literally going to start painting single strands. Switch to one of the single strand brushes from the set I provided. Decrease the brush size to very small, usually a size of 1. You may have noticed that these brushes contain three dots each. Real hair is actually semi-translucent. I find that a brush made from three dots spaced out creates that translucent look and creates a nice amount of variation in the stroke.
Make a new layer and pick a very light colour. Depending on the colour of your hair, you may even need to use pure white. Make the opacity of your brush %100 and litterally scribble a bunch of strokes on. Switch to a very dark colour and scribble all over the hair again. Duplicate this layer if your strokes aren't noticeable enough. Now we have:
Clean up the edges of the hair by erasing using the brush 'hair2'. Set the opacity of the eraser to %30 and go over the edges and tips of the hair.

The last thing we need to add is shadows and highlights. Hair is made up of millions of strands, but when it comes to highlights and shadow, we can treat it as one single object. If you check out some references, you will see that hair usually has a strip of lightness across it. This is the specular highlight. If we look at our reference photo, we can see it right here:
To create this light strip, first merge all of the hair layers (make sure you do not merge the background layer, we want the hair to be on a transparent background). You may or may not want to include the blocked in layer here; I have decided to throw it away. Switch to the dodge tool and use the 'hairblock' brush provided with the hardness turned all the way down. Set the dodge brush's range to 'midtones' and the exposure to %30. Brush on the light strip. To make some shadows, use the burn tool with the same settings. Burn the hair under the sweeping piece and accentuate some of the dark pieces you have already painted. Burn the area where the hair is parted. We now have:
I think this looks really good. Also, I want to mention it only took me half an hour to paint. If thats not quick, I don't know what is! Knowing the techniques and having the right brushes are the key to success here. Remember to constantly sample colours to maximize variations. Remember to build the details slowly; start with big chunks and work your way to single strands. Use your reference!
Here is how the hair looks when placed on the photo:
Pretty good. There are a few things I would change, but for the purposes of this tutorial, I think we're done!

Thanks for reading. I hope you found this helpful and will use these techniques in your next painting. If you've never tried painting hair before, try it!