Select Hair?

Get the Quick Selection tool (W) from the Toolbox and paint over the person’s hair, but stop short of painting over the edges of it. So, at this point, just make a very basic selection, avoiding the outside edge areas (that’s the tricky part). Avoid selecting any of the background area, as well. Once your selection is in place, go up to the Options Bar and click on the Refine Edge button. When the dialog appears, from the View Mode pop-up menu, choose Overlay. This view puts a red mask over the areas that aren’t selected, and I think this is the easiest way to work with hair, because you can see what you’re doing as you do it. Next, turn on the Smart Radius checkbox, and then drag the Radius slider to the right to around 2.0 px. Now comes the fun part: move your cursor outside the dialog, onto your image, and it changes into a selection brush. Paint over the edge areas of the hair, and it automatically senses where the areas are and makes a selection of those tough-to-select areas. In most cases, it does an amazing job, especially if the person is on a simple background (light gray backgrounds seem to work best, but as long as it’s a simple background, it will probably be okay). As you paint along the edges of the hair, you’ll see those areas are no longer red and they become the natural color of the image. That lets you know those areas are now added to your selection. If it selects too much, press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and paint to deselect those areas. At the bottom of the dialog is the Output To pop-up menu. From this menu, I generally choose New Layer, so when I click OK, the selected area is placed on its own separate layer, and I can then easily put a different background behind my subject.