For the designers, cutting out the hair image is one of the tough and time consuming task. With Refine Edge option in Photoshop CS5, there won’t be any further headaches for designers to make selections of such images.Now to make selection of the lady, first we can simply make the selection using path tool in Photoshop. Make sure the selection is taken inside from the edges. Then you can go to Select > Refine Edges.
Refine edge palette has multiple options to adjust the selection of the image. For this image, we have chosen Black & white view mode which acts similarly as the alpha channel layer. In the Edge Detection area, we have activated Smart Radius with 250px value. In order to get better selection we can adjust the value of edge using various available options like Smooth, feather, contrast and shift edge depending upon the desirable output we are looking forward to. In the output area, we get to choose how the refine edge output is to be displayed for the given image. For this image, we have shown layer mask as it will help us further refine our selection of the image.
With the use of refine edge option, although we get a convincing result, few of the hair parts are not nicely cutout. So, in order to adjust such parts, we can simply select the layer mask and adjust the value of Level to further refine the selection. (Image > Adjustment> Level)