Summary: Learn an easy way to make teeth whiter and brighter in Photoshop without going too far and making your image look fake.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Retouch tutorials.

In this photo retouching tutorial, we'll learn how to make teeth whiter and brighter using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, a brush and a layer mask.

Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial. The woman's teeth look nice and white already, but the man's teeth appear a bit dull and yellow and could use a little whitening:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Select The Area Around The Teeth With The Lasso Tool

First, grab the Lasso tool from the Tools palette in Photoshop, or press the letter L on your keyboard to quickly select it:

With the Lasso tool selected, I'm going to draw a selection around the guy's teeth. I don't need to be precise with my selection here because this selection is only temporary. All I need is to have his teeth inside the selected area:

Step 2: Choose A Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer

With the area around his teeth selected, I'm going to go to the bottom of the Layers palette and click on the New Adjustment Layer icon:

Then I'll select a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from the list:

This brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box, and we're going to use it to remove the yellow from his teeth and brighten them at the same time.