How To Whiten And Brighten Teeth In Photoshop
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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.
Step 3: Select Yellows From The Hue/Saturation Edit List
The reason his teeth are not white is because, obviously, there's too much yellow in them, so we need to remove the yellow. To do that, with the Hue/Saturation dialog box open, click the down-pointing arrow to the right of the word "Master" at the top of the dialog box and select Yellows from the list. This will allow us to make changes only to the yellow in the image:
With our yellows selected, drag the Saturation slider in the middle of the dialog box all the way to the left, which desaturates (removes) the yellow from the teeth, leaving the teeth whiter:
His teeth now appear whiter thanks to the yellow being removed. If only it were so easy in real life:
Step 4: Drag The Lightness Slider To The Right To Brighten The Teeth
His teeth now look whiter, but they could use some brightening as well, and we can do that using the same Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. First, go back up to the Edit list at the top of the dialog box, click on the down-pointing arrow once again, and this time, select Master from the list. The "Master" option allows us to make changes to every color in the image at once:
With "Master" selected, drag the Lightness slider, which is directly below the Saturation option, towards the right. This will brighten the teeth. The further you drag the slider, the brighter the teeth become. Keep an eye on your image in the document window as you drag the slider so you don't end up dragging it too far:
Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box.
We can see in the image now that not only have I brightened his teeth, I've also brightened the area around them, since that was the area I initially selected with my Lasso tool:
No worries though. We're going to fix that next.
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