Fiddling Tips - #1

A tip for getting rid of blunt/clumped looking hair when you want to use Janeway or Chakotay on a different background, because no matter how you cut out a head for a fiddle, you're often left with some bits of hair that LOOK cut out on another background and scream 'Fake!' before you've even started.

I use this trick a lot, so I thought I'd share and took screen-grabs as I went along this time. I mainly use Photoshop, but you should be able to use the basic method in most graphic programs that support brushes.

First, find yourself some fine hairstrand brushes on Deviantart.com or Renderosity.com etc., There are lots of freebies around. Unzip the file if needbe, then copy the *.abr file(s) to your brushes folder. In Photoshop CS3 the path would be, C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Brushes. Remember what your brushes are called :)

Okay, so then using one of my fiddles as an example....

I'd cut KJ off a background and was left with some blunt, obviously cutout edges to her hair

I made a new layer, picked up a dark tone from the existing hair as my foreground colour, then went looking for a fine-strand brush in my brushes palette. I found one, clicked on it to activate it,

then I slid over to the top-right of my Photoshop screen and clicked on the main Brush Presets Palette and played with the angle and horizontal (X-flip) options, and the size I wanted.

On my new layer, I painted the strands on in the darker tone for underhair.

When I was happy with the position, I duplicated this layer, then set the blend mode on the duplicate to be 'screen'. This lightened the duplicate layer for me, but I could also have just stamped the strands in a lighter or mid-tone instead. I then duplicated that 'screened' layer and upped the brightness on the new layer to give me the hair highlights. As a general rule, to make brushed-on hair look natural you should use 3 tones on 3 separate layers - dark, mid-tone, and light - with the dark tone on the bottom-most layer, mid-tone on the middle layer, and light on the topmost layer of your hair layers.

When I was happy with the tone and position, I played with the opacity on the layers a bit until it looked like this:

Then I turned on my new patterned background to check it looked okay.

After : Before:

See, that blunt 'cutout' look is all gone. See the completed fiddle HERE :)