Separating hair from a photo

Separating hair from a photo's background can be a tricky thing in Photoshop. I thought I could use practice with this for work and personal pieces, so I found a tutorial to help me out. The tutorial comes from: http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/handy-techniques-for-cutting-out-hair-in-photoshop

I found a couple of images of people that had fine hairs poking out here and there, and then I tried the techniques suggested. The first tutorial helped me out with this image. You'll see the original photo, and then you'll see my version with the new sky background. My version could use more work since I lost some of the finer hairs, but it was worth a try.

 

 

The second tutorial was good, but I didn't follow it too closely for this image. Here's the original photo on the left, and then my version on the right with the gradient background.