Changing Hair Colour
I was asked for a hair colouring tutorial on a Rogue manip I made for somebody, so here it is!

I use Photoshop. Never used PSP before, so I'm afraid I've got no idea how well this tute will translate.

First, get your base image how you want it - smooth out any imperfections, get the colouring right, whatever you want. In this case, I cheat and use this already gorgeous icon by puffed. (You can find the whole icon set here.)



I create a new layer, set to soft light, pick out my colour - in this case, white - and go over a section of the hair with a soft-edged brush. I then go around the edges of my segment with a hard-edged eraser to get rid of the excess.



That's an okay start, but it's not nearly white enough for me yet. I duplicate my layer twice and come up with this.



Which is plenty white, but as a result I'm losing the texture of the hair. To fix this, I use a cut out section from the base image.

Now, I'm sure there must be a cleaner way of doing this, but the way I've always done it (through my usual trial and error method) is to select all on any of my soft light layers (they're all the same, doesn't matter), switch to the move tool and hit an arrow key. This will move the opaque area of the canvass (ie, the bit I coloured in white) one pixel in whatever direction I hit and create a selection around that specific area. Because the latter is the only outcome that's useful to me, I hit the opposite arrow key to get my colouring back where it was.

Then, I switch to the original layer - the base image - and copy the selected area, which gives me this:



Without deselecting the area, I create a new layer on top of all the others and hit paste. This gets me:



(When you don't deselect, it pastes on top of your original selection - if you deselect first, it'll just paste directly in the middle of the canvass.



Which is that bit more work for me, and I'm nothing if not lazy.)

I desaturate this new layer and set it to soft light.



Nearly done. To clean things up a bit, I paste my segment of hair from the base image just above the base layer and go to Filter -> Blur -> Blur. It's a bit much, so I go to Edit -> Fade Blur, about 50%.



And that's all there is to it!

There is a bit of trial and error, of course.

This icon has one soft light layer of #190500.


This one has two soft light layers of black. The top layer (the desaturated section of hair on soft light) emphasised the highlights a bit too much and made them look too orange, so I didn't use it.


Three soft light layers with #CBBF9F and a fourth one which I desaturated. I erased all the colouring over the lock of hair at the bottom that's caught in the sunlight - it's already light enough and the extra brightness just made it too white.


(Base icons shown are from my Janel Moloney, Amy Sedaris and Emily Deschanel sets, respectively.)