How to remove flyaway hair in Photoshop

Open your image and create a new layer. Select the Clone Stamp tool from the menu on the left and use the following settings:

Mode: Normal

Opacity: 100%

Flow: 100%

Sample: Current & Below

You’ll need to select your source by holding down Alt (Option on Mac) and clicking on a point in the background. Now roughly paint away all the excess flyaways and frizz. This does not have to be perfect, as we will fine tune the look in the next few steps.

We will now add a Mask to the layer. Click on the rectangular icon with a circle at the bottom of the Layer palette.

Check that the foreground colour is set to black, as shown.

We will now use the Brush tool on the mask to reveal some of the hair we painted over. If you choose to restore some of the flyaways you can do that now.

If you’re using a graphic tablet, you can fine tune your Brush settings by going to Window > Brush Settings.

Once the menu appears, check off Transfer and change the Control options to ‘Pen Pressure’, as shown.

Paint over the mask using black as the foreground colour to reveal flyaways. You can also paint with white to hide flyaways. Press X on your keyboard to alternate the foreground colour between black and white.

If you feel comfortable with the look, you could stop while still keeping some flyaways visible.

Zoom into details to add and remove back flyaways as desired.

We’ve decided to remove the flyaways as well as some of the volume so hair shape appears more natural without the frizz. If you find that the edges look too soft, you can change the brush settings while you work (see next step).

We’ve changed the Flow setting to 79% and hardened the brush to give the edges more definition. Keep playing around with the look until you’re happy. It’s all about trial and error!

This is our final image. We took an additional step of blurring the edge of the hair on a separate layer (with ‘Sample All Layers’ ticked off), using the Blur tool. This helps give the hair a soft focus.