making background white but spiky hair problem

bandit

hi all
i apreciate your time in reading this.
i have done some shots for a family friend i have tried to make the white background bright white in adobe cs5 but having alot of trouble around his Spiky hair
i am quite new to cs5 and tried all sorts of stuff is there an easier way to do this that i am missing. please can anyone help me

this pic is a bad quality version as the good ones are on my home computer this just happened to be on my works 1

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digismile

One of your issues is that both the shirt and the background are grey/white, but the shirt is much brighter than the background. Any adjustment to the background will also brighten the shirt, so getting the background sufficiently close to white will blow out the detail in the shirt.

To target the background (and the shirt to some extent) you will need to make a selection and mask to increase the brightness of just the background.

Not knowing you Photoshop skills just yet, here is a link to an fairly easy way to make a selection to try brightening the background. We can start with this and move forward to something a bit more advanced.

This should give you a pretty good start!

regards,

bandit

ok fantastic thanks for a great reply i will try this when i get home.
in regardsto the tshirt couldnt i just make the tshirt a seperate layer or would the colour range still change the white in this

basflt

use eyedropper+ [ middel one ] to add range and use fuzziness to adjust

yes , it is an idea to make the shirt a layer
select it in the same way , or by hand [ lasso ]