How to whiten teeth in Photoshop CS4

Many artists will photoshop models and actors these days for magazines, shows, or advertisements. One of the most prevalent changes has to do with teeth whitening, which is not that difficult to do. Even if you're not working on professional photos, you still might have some pictures you want to clean up. So in this tutorial, we're going to look at how to whiten a model's teeth using Photoshop CS4.

First, open the picture you want to use in Photoshop. I'm using a stock photo of teeth from MorgueFile. Once you've loaded the document, press Q on your keyboard to enter quick mask mode; this will allow us to paint a selection. Click on the brush tool on the Tools panel (on the left hand side of the workspace), then click on the color swatch at the bottom of the Tools panel and change the color to black. You'll use black to make a selection and white to erase a part of a selection. Make sure you have a relatively small brush size to start with by clicking the arrow next to the brush tip preview along the top bar (mine's set to 24 px).



Using the brush tool, paint a selection around the edges of the teeth first. Carefully outline them; a pink-red color should appear as you paint. If you make a mistake or slip, you can always change the color to white and paint over it to erase it. Keep working until you've outlined all the teeth neatly.



Now change the brush size to something larger (like 66 px) and brush over the middle of each tooth, taking care to stay inside the outlines. Again, if you make a mistake, you can brush over it using white.



Once you've made sure you've painted over every bit that you want included in the selection, press Q to exit quick mask mode. You'll see the marching ants marquee appear around the area and the rest of the picture; this means that everything except the teeth are selected. So we need to click Select (along the top bar) and Inverse in order to select the teeth.



Now it's time to whiten the teeth. To do this, we need to add an adjustment layer. Click on Layer, then New Adjustment Layer, then Hue/Saturation. Navigate to the right hand side of the workspace and find the adjustments panel above the layer panel, then move the saturation slider to the left to desaturate it and get rid of the yellow. I've moved mine down to about -40. Then you can move the Lightness slider up a little bit (I've moved mine to about +15) so add more whiteness. If you find any places where the white overlaps the gums, then you can grab a black brush to fix it.





It's that simple! You can play around with it to get the amount of whiteness you want; just be sure that it looks somewhat natural and that you don't have too much gray by desaturating too much.

About CODANK Web Design

CODANK is a top rated Web Design and Internet Marketing firm located in Charlotte, NC. We are dedicated to providing the highest quality, cost effective custom software development services, delivering a broad range of business consulting and outsourcing services.

For more information, visit us at www.codank.com