Flyaways are a backdrop problem
Strands of hair that float off the head against a studio backdrop are the first thing a professional retoucher cleans up in a headshot, and the most tedious: dozens of curved lines, each one or two pixels wide. The good news is that the hard part is not the hair. Behind every flyaway is a plain backdrop — seamless paper, a painted wall, an overcast sky — and a plain backdrop can be rebuilt exactly. So this mode does two things: it finds the strands, and it rebuilds the backdrop behind them. It never edits the hair on the head, and it never touches the face.
How Find flyaways finds strands
A strand is a thin curved line of a different brightness from the backdrop around it. Find flyaways looks for exactly that at two fine scales, keeping only the centre line of each candidate so neighbouring detail cannot join in. A candidate must be long enough to be a strand, thin enough to be hair, and — crucially — must sit over a plain area: the picture just beside it, on both sides, has to be calm. That last test is what keeps it off the hair mass, the eyebrows and the edges of clothing. Curved strands are fine.
Nothing is erased until you choose. Click a strand on the photo to select it, or use Select all, and check the selection before erasing. If one was missed, tap right on it with the Hair tool: the tracer snaps to the strongest thin line near your tap and follows it in both directions with a wide turning allowance, measuring its width and capping it at four pixels so the selection stays as thin as the hair.
How the backdrop is rebuilt
For each selected strand, the editor first tries to fit the backdrop around it as a flat colour or a smooth gradient. On studio paper that fit is nearly perfect, and the strand is replaced by the fitted backdrop plus its own fine noise — exact, and nothing invented. Where the backdrop is not flat enough for that, the strand is refilled smoothly from both sides and the backdrop's grain is measured and added back, so the repair does not read as a soft streak. Pixels outside the strands are copied through untouched.
What it will not do
Hair crossing skin, eyes or clothing is left alone. Retouching hair over a face means inventing skin, which belongs to beauty retouching, and this site does not do face retouching of any kind. For a single stray strand over the face, the honest advice is to fix it before you take the photo. For an object rather than a hair — a mic cable, a clip, a piece of tape on the backdrop — use Remove unwanted objects, or the Clone stamp tool if you want to choose exactly what covers it.
Passport and visa photos
Many official photo specifications do not accept digitally altered photos. If a photo is for a passport, visa or ID, retake it with the hair tidied rather than editing it.