When it comes to hair care, having a stunning photo is essential. It’s the perfect way to showcase the beauty of your product and captivate potential customers. But editing hair for shampoo and conditioner brands can be tricky – if done incorrectly, you could end up with an image that looks unnatural or unrealistic.
That’s why Paper Boat Creative is here to help! In this article, we’ll provide expert tips on how to edit and retouch photos of women’s hair, specifically, for Herbal Essences – a brand that celebrates beautiful locks in all their glory. We will discuss everything from color correction techniques, skin smoothing methods, and more, so you can create images that shine brighter than ever before.
Let’s get started!
How to Retouch Hair for a Professional Photo Look
We did a trial shoot and edit for Unilever’s Herbal Essences, Indonesia. We worked on the White Strawberry and Sweet Mint series.
So, let’s start with the original photo, even if the model is stunning and her hair is ultra-straight, it will be inevitable that her hair will not be 100% perfect (shampoo commercial standard perfect). There may be a few stray hairs, or the hair may not be exactly in the right place.
Furthermore, we want to show movement in the hair, but to have moving hair, you need a stronger light setting, which could ruin the skin lighting on the model. So, for this, the photographer normally shoots extra plates (extra shots) of the hair only to address this issue.
In this photo, the main problems are:
- Overall, the photo looks dull
- Hair is too warm
- Hair is blurred
- Pores of skin are too rough
Things need to change, improve, adjust, and retouch. That being said, with the right techniques, you can make a photo look totally different!
Highlight the Focus on the Hair
First, make adjustments on Camera Raw. This is where you can enhance the clarity and texture of hair.
Here’s the output:
Clean Up Stray Hairs
To get a more professional look, clean up the stray hairs. Start with a clone tool to remove the stray hairs one by one. Be careful not to overdo it and make sure you keep the overall texture of hair intact.
For this hair cleanup, we specifically used a combination of techniques using the spot healing tool, manual airbrush, and adobe plug-ins.
The Pores of the Skin Need to be Lessened or Smoothened
Next, smooth out the skin. We suggest using a combination of frequency separation and adobe plug-ins to get a natural looking finish. You can also use Dodge & Burn tools if necessary.
For this skin edit, we used the clone, spot or healing brush, and some adobe plug-ins.
Use Delicious Skin to Smoothen the Skin
We used Delicious Skin’s Magic Retouch Pro Plug-in to smoothen out the skin. This is a great tool that helps reduce blemishes, wrinkles, and pores quickly and easily.
Use Dust and Scratches to Minimize Pores
We also used the Dust and Scratches feature in Photoshop to further minimize the pores. This is great for removing any remaining imperfections on the skin.
Work on the Composition of the Hair
Lastly, you can adjust the composition of the hair. We suggest using a combination of adjustment layers to achieve a more dramatic look. You can also use dodge and burn tools to add depth and dimension.
We used other shots to combine on the working file to help the blurred area look sharper.
Add Adjustments on the Skin and Hair
Now, let’s work on the skin and hair tones. We used curves to adjust the tone of the photo until we were satisfied with it.
In the photo below, we can see that the model’s skin appears pale, so we added warmth:
Meanwhile, the hair comes off as too warm, so we reduced the saturation:
We then masked the model to replace the background:
Add Elements on the Layout
You can now place other visual elements on the layout, such as glamour shots of the shampoo bottle, brand logos, and product descriptions.
You can also add your own creative elements like textures, shapes, and light leak effects.
We used the Clipping path or other selection tool to remove the background of the elements to place them neatly on the layout.
We also made the bottle transparent to make it look natural.
Here’s the Before and After look of the shampoo bottle:
And here’s the final output for the shoot:
Choose Paper Boat Creative for Your Hair Photo Retouching Needs
As you can see, hair photo retouching is a complex task that requires both technical and creative skills. At Paper Boat Creative, our team of experienced professionals understand the nuances of hair photography and knows how to use various tools like Camera Raw, Photoshop, plug-ins, and other techniques to bring out the best in any image.
We specialize in high-end image editing for e-commerce businesses, so if you’re looking for professional help with your product images or need bulk editing services – we have it all!
Contact us today to learn more about how we can enhance your brand’s online presence through beautiful photographs edited by experts.
