How To Whiten And Brighten Teeth In Photoshop

Step 6: Select The Brush Tool

Select Photoshop's Brush tool from the Tools palette, or press B on your keyboard to quickly select it:

Step 7: Set White As Your Foreground Color

Make sure you have white selected as your foreground color, since we're going to be painting on the layer mask with white in order to reveal the effects of the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer over the guy's teeth. To quickly set it to white, first make sure you have the Hue/Saturation layer mask selected in the layers palette, and then press the letter D on your keyboard, which will set your foreground color to white and your background color to black:

Step 8: Paint With White Over The Teeth To Restore The Whitening And Brightening

With our brush selected, the layer mask selected in the Layers palette, and white as our foreground color, all we need to do now is paint over the teeth with our brush to bring back the whitening and brightening. You'll probably need to change the size of your brush as you're painting. To change the brush size, press the right bracket key on your keyboard to make the brush larger and the left bracket key to make it smaller. You'll find the bracket keys to the right of the letter "P" on your keyboard. If you want to adjust the edge hardness of the brush, hold down your Shift key and press the right or left bracket keys. Shift+right bracket makes the brush edges harder, and Shift+left bracket makes the edges softer.

Simply paint over the teeth with the brush to reveal the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer over those areas, making the teeth whiter and brighter. You may find it easier to zoom in on the teeth, as I'm doing here:

If you accidentally paint over an area you didn't mean to, just press the letter X on your keyboard to swap your Foreground and Background colors, which will set your Foreground color to black. Paint over the mistake to hide the effects of the adjustment layer, then press X again to switch back to white and continue painting.

For some areas, you may also find it easier to paint with a lower opacity brush. You'll find the Opacity option in the Options Bar at the top of the screen. A low opacity of around 20% is sometimes helpful to avoid over brightening teeth in the darker corners of the mouth:

Continue painting over the teeth until you've whitened and brightened them all. I'll zoom back out of my photo, and we can see that the man's teeth are now just as white as the woman's teeth:

Step 9: Lower The Opacity Of The Adjustment Layer If Needed

Keep in mind that no matter what the toothpaste companies want us to believe, our teeth are not supposed to be pure white. If you find that your whitening effect is a bit too strong, making the teeth look unnaturally white, you can easily fine-tune the effect by lowering the opacity of the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. You'll find the Opacity option near the top of the Layers palette. I'm going to lower my opacity down to about 75%:

Here is my final "teeth whitening" result:

And there we have it!

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