Trouble with removing this bride's fly-away hairs

NedM

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I am having such the biggest hassle removing this bride's fly-away hairs.
I've tried numerous tools and techniques but I can't seem to find an effective way.

Can someone help?
I've used clone stamp, spot healing brush, but it looks so obvious.
People say to use redefine edge but I can't seem to figure that out.

CMSbdx9.jpg
 
I would use the clone tool at a 1-2 pixel width and just work along the length of the hair; it will take a few minutes, but it should be nearly invisible.
 
Yep... that's probably a half-hour job from start to finish.

or duplicate the layer and choose multiply as the blend mode. Alt+layer mask to hide that and then use a brush with white and paint over the background (including the flyaway hair). 4-5 minutes and the added feature of making the couple stand out. (Okay, so not the same thing but it would work)
 
Yep... that's probably a half-hour job from start to finish.

or duplicate the layer and choose multiply as the blend mode. Alt+layer mask to hide that and then use a brush with white and paint over the background (including the flyaway hair). 4-5 minutes and the added feature of making the couple stand out. (Okay, so not the same thing but it would work)

I tried what you said, but it didn't work so well for me.
 
i got rid of them easy with the clone stamp alone, i had to do a little bit of "restoration" below her left ear:

$no-flys.jpg

BUT, I think it looks fake when you remove them all, so I added back a few select strays:

$some_flys.jpg


this took me about 10-15min.
 
try making a selection that includes the two people and all the hair you do want.
then invert the selection and copy it to a new layer.
then use the filter to remove dust and scratches to remove the flyaways
that seems to do a decent job on 90% of the flyaways
then remove the rest manually
 
What pixel size brush were you using?

7px for most of the edits, then like 2-3px for the tighter areas/corners.

The area in blue around her neck was where I took the most time. I pretty much just filled in the entire area with a new graident, cut it out around her neck, then added noise to match.


then use the filter to remove dust and scratches to remove the flyaways

I just tried this on the image and it REALLY degraded the IQ. I had to use 2px to remove the flyaways, then threshold at 25 levels to try to save as much IQ as possible. It *did* work, but I don't like this method after trying it and see the compromise.


and just, fwiw, pulling some green out of the image and adding some blacks/mids back into the image did it wonders.

$some_flys_levels.jpg
 
Last edited:
$example.jpg

Okay so I was able to somewhat rid the stray hairs while maintaining the naturalness of the photo.
 

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