Hello all, I am attempting to photomanip an image of a model into the DC Comics character Supergirl and while the overall image and pose are exactly what I want, the gal in the photo has brunette (brown) hair and Supergirl is blonde. So, I'd like to know what would the best way to color correct or change the hair color in the image from brown to yellow without it looking bad. Thanks, Paul Novak "darth_paul99"

Changing value (dark to light) is trickier than changing color (brown to red, for example).  If I were doing it, I would make a fairly close selection of the hair, feather the selection, then make a 'selective color' adjustment layer and start manipulating color.  (You could do the same thing with a 'hue/saturation' layer.  They operate a little differently.)  Try manipulating separate color channels (red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, etc).  

Keeping the selection, you can also make a levels adjustment layer and play with the lightness and darkness of the hair (you can also use a 'curves' layer, but I find 'levels' more intuitive.)  

I am also very fond of the shadow/highlight function under Image>Adjustments>Shadow Highlights.  But be careful to make a copy layer of the original because Shadow/Highlights will make changes directly to your image.  

Good luck.  -Drew

find another photo of a model with blonde hair (same shape, lighting, viewing angle). cut out that hair and paste it over the original model's hair. feather and blend the edges. it will still look fake, but it won't look as bad as trying to use brightness/contrast/colour replacement. p.s. if it's a copyrighted photo, it's probly illegal to redistribute an altered version, but it's extremely rare for any of these sites enforce their TOS on photomanips, and even rarer for the copyright owner to spot one of 'em.

Thanks for the tips folks, and I'm well aware of the legalities of altering photos. Most every photo found on the net is probably copyrighted in some way or another, but you're right most of these sites don't enforce any types of rules on altered photos, (I've yet to find one that does) especially ones turned into comic book characters which unless their your own are copyrighted anyway, and the companies that own them don't do any enforcing either because it's all just acceptable fan art. It's not going to be easy to do this, but I'm going to figure out something.

i would duplicate the layer, mask edit that new layer, until you are only left with the hair, ( duplicate that new just hair layer aswell, but hide it) then back to the first just hair layer, do a "layer style" "colour overlay" with that layer (picking a light yellow colour), set that layer to "colour" whilst still in the layer style option, then click "ok", with your layer pallette in the main window, set that now altered layer to "pin light",now go unhide your second duplicated hair layer (making sure it is the top layer) and in the layer pallette set that layer to "soft light" ( that will bring back the highlights from the original layer to the coloured layer). 

additional gradient layer overlays can be made or other colour overlays, to make it more believable, depends how much time you wanna spend on it.

anyway here is my starter brown hair:- ( i just did the top paragraph bit)

.......and here is the altered one. .....kinda works anyway. personally i'd work on it a bit more but if you just want a quick fix then that might do it.

....i fiddled a bit more with a yellow but nearly white colour overlay on the original hair pic, and blended that with the previous results ( "layer style"/"blending options"), and set that to "lighten" in the layer pallette, and i think it is quite blonde now, but i guess it comes down to what colour blonde you are after.

whole thing took about five minutes, but will take a bit longer to do the masking bit.

vince3, thanks very much for your walktrough, I had found something similar to what you've presented that I was going to try, but I believe that you have shown me something much better. It's definiately the best that I've gotten and is exactly what I'm attempting to do.

Create a new layer on top of the layer with the hair, chane the bending mode to color on the new layer. Use your paintbrush with the color you want the hair to be and paint rignt over the ares of the hair on the NEW LAYER you just created.  All you really have to be careful of is staying within the contour of the original hair.  You can load what you just painted as a selection by ctrl-clicking on the new layer and then manipulate that further. via adjustment layers or directly manipulating the new layer.