Photoshop tutorial: Whiten Teeth and Brighten Smile

[X_Rogue_X]

Here's a quick way to brighten a smile that looks natural.

It can be tempting to just grab a paintbrush and start painting with white when you want to fix yellow teeth. Most times, though, it ends up looking terrible. Try this:

Grab the sponge tool, set the mode to Desaturate, and the Flow somewhere in the 20-30% range. Change the brush size for each tooth, making sure it fits inside, and paint the teeth. Don't touch the gums or lips.

Next, grab the dodge tool, set the range to Midtones, and Exposure to 20-30%. Use a soft brush and increase the size to one that will cover all the teeth in one stroke (or close to it).

With a little practice and care, you'll end up with whiter teeth that look natural and most people will be hard pressed to notice the editing.

Here's an example using a photo I got from Stockvault. I wasn't able to find the photographer info, but I'll go back and look again and will edit this post with the proper credit if I can.



If you look closely, you can still see a few yellow areas, but I intentionally left them because few people have perfectly white teeth anyway.

Edit: image by photographer "prime" of Stockvault.net

[Gaussian]

Awesome tip Rogue, thanks for sharing!

[iDad]

I always have a sweet tooth for a good tip. thanks!

[Albobo]

It's a good method that I used to use, but it's destructive. It'd be hard to edit the whitening later in your work if you decide to change something.

You could instead duplicate the layer, mask the duplicate except for the mouth area, then use the sponge & dodge tools on the duplicate layer. A quicker method would be to create a new transparent layer and paint on it with a low opacity white brush and change the blending mode of the new layer to Saturation, and go through the process again with an even lower opacity white brush and set the blending mode to Luminosity.

With those methods, you can easily change the strength of your edit by changing the opacity of the layers, or simply erase spots where there's too much.

[X_Rogue_X]

NP at all iDad, I've got a bunch more I'll be writing up soon

[jimmytx3]

Thank you, good tip.