Topic awaiting preservation: Help with making hair look wet...

Hey, I got this image that I am trying to make look like my wife is in the shower, I won't go into alot of detail, here is the rough draft, scaled down of course...
Now, what I want to do is make her hair look like it's wet... But I am not that advanced in PS... Can anyone help me out?

Here is the orginal graphic, full size (163.1kb)


Any and all help would be much appreciated!

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

[Emp edit: adding UBB code]

[This message has been edited by Emperor (edited 01-13-2004).]

[This message has been edited by chris_ensell (edited 01-26-2004).]

You're links aren't working, so I can't see anything.

But, in general, wet hair will have more specular light, will be much heavier (layered on the head, hanging straight down), and be more disorderly.

Yeah, my crappy server is down again... It should be back in 3-4 hours...

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

weeell, i say it whouldn't be posible, i mean you could make it wet, but the hair should be kinda glued to each other...search for swimsuite models in google, there i think you should find a refrence for wet hair...

Yeah, I was kinda affraid it wouldn't be possible...

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

It's not like you're trying to make mila jovovich's hair wet. It's you'r wife...Better spare yourself the trouble and get her into the shower
:P

^ good point.

That aside, what you ahve to keep in mind is that this isn't a "photoshop" question.

This is a question of appearance, and what is required to make the hair look wet.

With some observation and a bit of play, it is certainly possible. It will most likely mean getting in there by hand though, and using some paintbrush, some blurs, some smudge, etc.

But always remember that a question like this has far less to do with your knowledge of photoshop, and a lot more to do with generic artisitc technique.

Oh baby, i love that milla jovovich - Man, she's got those eyes no one has...

Only cause she keeps stealing them. I swear... she has to have an eye collection or something.

while it will be diffucult you can get a long way towards the effect.

The appearance of dry or wet hair is defined mainly by it highlights and shadows. Wet hair should consist of defused higlights, not the crisp hard edge that you have now. So you need to do two things, remove the old highlight with distroying the shadow details. I would try dust and scratchs on a duplicate layer that you can set to softlight.

Next you need to make a new refection map. I just duplicated the original layer, applied motion blur, Artistic--> Plastic Wrap Filter and then motion blur again. I then used a brush and the smudge tool to make a few long vertical stokes that follow the major hair flow areas.

It should look something like this:
http://www.texturehunter.com/img/temp/HairReflect.jpg

I then set that layer to softlight and adjusted and necessary.

Here's the finished effect, It was done just quicly with a little more work and some perhaps a few more layers of reflection maps and some creative use of the smudge too to clump hair, you could get something accaptable. Expecially for the use you planning for it, great detail would not be needed.
http://www.texturehunter.com/img/temp/wethair.jpg

Wow, thanks alot... That is he look I am going for... I better right that down and see what I can do... I'll post a final here tonight...

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

Wet hair also appears darker than non-wet hair.

Ok, here is what I've got so far...

http://www.aoy.com/wet_hair.jpg

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

[This message has been edited by chris_ensell (edited 01-26-2004).]

its very dull it looks mushy, maybe overlay a higher contrast version of the hair over it.

Of the original hair or the new wet hair?

We're affraid to call it sex, so let's call it swimming...

I have to say that I don't see anything "wet" about either posted example.

For starters, there are still loose "frizzy" bits that wouldn't exist when wet - it will clump together, and as Meta said - the hair will be significantly darker when wet.

Please don't underestimate the importance of observation - you can't make something look wete if you don't have a clear image of what it would look like wet.