What am I doing wrong in Photoshop?

You have to “select” the hair only. Do you have the whole page selected or are you using edit>fill with nothing at all selected? If you want to select the hair only use the magic wand tool and click on the background behind her hair. Then go to the menu. choose select>inverse. It will select the hair. Now you can go to Edit>fill. It should just fill in the hair only. I am assuming you just want to fill it with solid color, sort of like a cartoon drawing. If you want a more subtle effect you have to play with opacity and other things. Hope this helps!

That’s unusual, because from the looks of your layers – the part with the hair should be the entire layer. I’m not sure why it is filling the whole space. (Although, I don’t use “Photoshop.”)

I would try @Earthgirl‘s suggestion, see what is selectable. If you’re trying to fill it with a whole new color, I would definitely play around with the overlay option in your layers menu. A solid recolor, even with the opacity turned down, will look shocking.

Oh! Nevermind, I missed the first link. You’re going for a solid recolor.

Also, you may want to find a free select tool and cut around the edge of the forehead and up around the hair. You don’t want that bit of skin to show as filled.

Just looking at this tutorial… you know, you can do all this a lot easier with the photocopy filter, and it’ll look better too.

Take a snapshot of the original image. With the snapshot, change the colors with the hue saturation tool, or the variations tool. Select the art history brush for the modified image. Decrease the hardness and opacity. Gently use the art history brush on the original image.

Here’s how I would fill the hair with a solid color

Select the hair layer

Choose the Magic Wand tool

Click outside the hair. Everything BUT the hair will be selected

Choose “Invert selection” from the Select menu. Now ONLY the hair is selected

Creat a new empty layer and choose it

Fill the hair-shaped selection in the new layer. Voila!

Once you’ve created the new layer (the hair) using the lasso tool, you need to paste the selection into that new layer (which you’ve obviously done already) and then select just the hair (the non-transparent part of the new layer) by hitting CTRL and clicking the little preview picture of the layer in the layer selection window (see the black frame around the little picture of the hair in the example next to the blue highlighted layer in the tutorial? That means it’s selected) by CTRL-clicking on that preview box you automatically select that layers’ components and then when you use the fill bucket, it will only affect the non-transparent part (the hair) of the layer selection. By doing so you will have a big ugly brown layer in the shape of the hair selection. BTW I would recommend cutting off the part of the forehead you have in your “Hair” layer so it doesn’t make the shape funky. Now you can move on to Step #6. BTW some of the suggestions before me have some better ways of accomplishing similar effects… but since you’re trying to hang with this tutorial, I’m only trying to help ya where you’re going wrong. Good luck!

Ahhh… sometimes things are really much easier than all that… (no offense to all above which would work. But really this one is much faster and easier than that)

Look at this video.

It is a fun and easy technique.

:D Have fun! Show us the results okay?

Dog Thanks for that tip and I’ll be checking out his blog as well as Photoshop World.

@Dog that’s a great tutorial and an amazing tool everyone should master, but not what @troubleinharlem is trying to accomplish using the linked tutorial. I’m still giving you props for helping out, but that’s not going to work for the hair issue. As I previously stated, it’s a simple selection problem.

@Dog : Is that you?