How to Change Hair Color in Photoshop

Today's lesson will cover how to change hair color in Adobe Photoshop using adjustment layers.

First, let's determine what color the hair should be after editing. If it's a "surprise" color, the following method will work perfectly.

Take a photo where you need to change the hair color.

Changing the color to blue, yellow, red, etc. will take very little time.

Take the Polygonal Lasso Tool and start selecting the area around the hair.

Now, without deselecting, press CTRL+J to create a new layer from the selection you just made.

Use the eraser to remove any unwanted elements from the hair on the new layer.

If you want to turn a dyed brunette into a natural blonde, you can use levels:

Create an adjustment layer by clicking the button in the Layers panel.
Move the dark slider to the right (to make the white even whiter).

Here's the result.

But I think it's better to dye the hair a more natural color, say, blue...

To do this, go to the Layers panel and create another adjustment layer, this time Hue/Saturation.

Set the necessary values for each parameter, making sure to check the box next to Colorize.

The result.

As you've probably guessed, you can change the color to any color except black, because it will look ashy, or rather like gray hair.

So, here's another method for that purpose.

Create three more duplicate layers of the hair, and hide the original, as it might come in handy later.

Convert these three layers to black and white by selecting each one and pressing CTRL + SHIFT + U. This action is used to desaturate the image.

Now create the missing adjustment layers, namely: Brightness/Contrast and Curves.

Next, hide the adjustment layers Hue/Saturation and Levels.

Set the hair layers to the following blending modes: the top two to Multiply, and the last one to Soft Light.

As you can see from the image above, the hair has turned gray, but not black.

To fix this, enable and adjust the recently created Curves and Brightness adjustment layers. You can also use a Levels adjustment layer if the hair is too light, as in my example.

Don't forget to enable our color layer to remove elements from the black-and-white layers that should remain in the original, i.e., here we need to erase the flower-shaped hairpin from the dark hair.