The Dirty Secret of Hair Masking: How Professional Compositors Handle the Impossible Shots

Hair masking is where composites go to die. I’ve been building images for movie posters and album covers long enough to have a folder called “failures” that I review every month, and I can tell you that at least a third of the early entries involve hair. Specifically, they involve the moment I realized that the subject I’d spent an hour cutting out still had a halo of the original background clinging to every strand.