Photoshop help (white background)

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Hey guys,

I've been given a picture in which they want the background to be made white.

Now the focus is pretty bad but they don't really care because it's for a small web image.

The problem is I'm terrible at photoshop. I've used a couple of youtube techniques in the past which have turned out okay (it has been on males with little hair though) but I'm having a problem with the hair in this picture.

I've tried 2 techiques, using quick selection tool, and using the colour dropper to (in theory) change the colour of the background automatically.

The problem I have is that it works fine for everything outside of the portrait but the gaps in the hair are still grey. Nothing I do looks natural.

So, can you guys help out?

It's a bit cheeky but it would be great if someone could do it for me but also if you could explain the best method for doing it.

The pictures:

Original:

http://i.imgur.com/QukG7YN.jpg

My terrible attempt:

http://i.imgur.com/eGugKq0.jpg

Thanks a lot.

 

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Thanks guys.

Hair is always a bit of a pickle to do really well. Everyone's got their own technique but ultimately you end up doing it in pieces and layering it up from different parts.

I go to: Image: Calculations. From there I tend to take the green channel and merge it with the red, then i'll use add or subtract to see which works best as a base mask.

From there I use burn and dodge to bring out the hair detail and use a combination of brush in overlay mode to finish off.

Below was done in ten minutes with that technique. Not perfect (the right is missing some detail) but it's something you could spend an hour on to do properly.

Hope that helps?

This looks pretty spot on to me!

Photoshop is just such a massive app for a newbie, I struggle to figure out where to even start!

Thanks a lot.

 

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They've given me a few more to do now, that's what I get for cheating!

Arcane, if you have some time do you think you could give slightly more detailed instructions on how you did it please?

Super easy/lazy way to fix this is to play around with Replace Colour technique found under Image > Adjustment > Replace Colour

10 sec.

I've tried this method and it doesn't seem to work very well for me. It ends up white but the background looks dirty and because the shade of grey in between the strands of hair is slightly different it ends up looking a bit weird.