Adding Hair to Renders

How to add hair to your poser renders : This is only my way of doing it, keep on experimenting to find your own style and most of all have fun. I look for a hairstyle in a magazine that I like, scan it and take it from there. Using a scan of real hair makes it easier to add all the different colours and highlights you find in real hair, and to see how real hair flows (makes it more believable).
Step one: Pose your figure (I used Stephanie) and set up the lighting and clothes. Change the background to a dark colour. Render the final pic in a new window, antialias on. Save the render as a psd file (this saves an alpha channel with the file which you can use in Photoshop to delete the background)	Step two: Scan in a hairstyle from a magazine that will fit into your poser image. Use the polygonal lasso tool and trace around the image to get rid of most of the background and face, and delete the background.
Step three: Use the eraser to rub out the hard edges around hair. Add a new layer under the hair, and fill it with a similar colour as the hair (use the dropper to choose a medium colour)	Step four: Duplicate the hair layer. Change the bottom hair layer to overlay the background colour and the top layer to multiply. This blends the hair into the brown layer, and gets rid of the of the background.
Step five: Set the bottom layer to invisible, save the hair with the transparent background as a tiff file. (We’ll use the tiff file to make an alpha layer)	Step six: Open the tiff file (don’t close your other file). Convert to a negative image [image>adjust>invert]. Change the mode to black&white. [Image>mode>grayscale]. Use levels [Image>adjust>levels] to get rid of most of the black inside the white, and then use the eraser to get rid of the last bits. Select all and copy the layer. Now go to your other file, create a new alpha channel (under channels) and paste your image into the alpha channel.
Step seven: Flatten the layers and use [select>load selection], choose the alpha channel. If you prefer a softer edge blur the alpha channel slightly before selecting. Open the poser render you saved as a .psd file and drag your selection into the pic.	Step eight: Use [edit>transform>scale] to fit the hair onto Stephanie. Get rid of the colour background behind the figure by loading the alpha channel that poser saved with the file, invert it and delete the background. I prefer to have the background on its own layer.
Step nine: Once you have the hair in position, the fun starts. Get your hair brushes out and use the smudge tool to “comb” the hair following the direction of the hair. This is where you use the dark and light from the hair to make your own hair painting.	Step ten: Keep on brushing, adding wisps around the face. Use the dodge and burn tool to add more shadows and highlights. Experiment with duplicating the hair layer, and the screen and multiply modes, you can get unexpected results that look great. Use the paint dropper tool to pick one of the highlight colours and add strands of hair with the 1 pixel brush. Like I said, this is just one way to do it. The advantage of doing it this way is you can save the initial hair file after you prepared it and use it again later. Happy painting! Mada :) Final image here