What is the secret of a bright and beautiful smile? The answer is the teeth. Having white and healthy teeth make your smile look fabulous. In short, it gives you many advantages. Everyone would love to converse with you, it boosts your confidence, and so on. However, it would be terrible if the not-so-white or yellowish teeth were captured in a photo. Moreover, the photo will be used for something important, like a wedding souvenir.
But, you don’t have to worry. Photoshop is here for you. With a bit of tweaking here and there, the yellowish and not-so-beautiful teeth in the photo can be changed into white and beautiful teeth. Do you want to know how to do that? Here, we have a complete tutorial on how to whiten teeth in photoshop. Continue reading to find out more about it.
How to Whiten One Person Teeth
Why only one person? If you take a picture of many people, is it much faster to edit them all at the same time? That might be true. However, each person in the photo has different teeth colors. It could be the yellow color intensity, a shadow that covers the teeth surface, or the light that touches the surface of the teeth. Hence, it would be better to edit one person each to get the perfect result. Here is the step-by-step guide on how to do that.
- Open Photoshop and make a new file.
- Open the File menu and choose the Place option. Pick the photo you want to edit.
Note: you also can open the photo directly on Photoshop, and the photo you are going to edit will be the background layer. - Now, click the Lasso icon on the Toolbar.
- Select the teeth area that you want to edit. No need to worry, if you can’t select the tooth in detail or accurately. Make sure it covers the area that you want to edit.
- Click the New Fill or Adjustment Layer on the Layers panel to create the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer.
On the popup menu, pick Hue/Saturation.
Now, you have the Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer that you will use to edit the color of the teeth. The position of the layer is on top of the background color where you place the photo. Next, we move to the editing process.
Adjusting the Teeth Color
In this part, you will use the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to edit your photo. Here is how to do it.
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- Go to the Properties panel or double-click on the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.
- Change the Edit option into Master.
Note: The Master option here means the change you make here will affect all colors. But, you want to edit the yellowish teeth, right? So, choose yellow to change and edit this color only. - Find the Saturation slider then click, hold, and move the slider allowed to the left. This step will remove the yellowish color on the teeth. By moving the slider further to the left, you can make the teeth look whiter. However, the teeth also have a natural yellow color on them. So, we do not recommend moving it too far to the left (-100). Move it to make the yellow look soft (-80).
At this point, the process is over. The teeth look white and beautiful. You also can try to see the difference between before and after editing. Just click the Eye icon on the left side of the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to deactivate and activate the layer for comparison with the background photo.
Let’s Brighten the Teeth
Removing the yellow stain on the teeth is not enough from our perspective. To create a beautiful smile in your photo, you also need to make the teeth shine brighter. Here is how you create that shine on Photoshop.
- Go to the Properties panel and return the Edit option from Yellow to the default setting, Master. This way you can adjust all colors.
- Drag the slider on the Lightness slide on the bottom of the panel. Do not move it too far to the right. It will only give unnecessary highlights to your photo. Our recommendation is to slide until it reaches +20. Or, you can use your preference to get the brightness that you like.
Note: you might notice the brightening process doesn’t work accurately on the teeth. Most likely, it happens because you miss some part when you select the area using the Lasso tool earlier. - Use the Layer Mask tool to correct the problem in step 2. Double click the Layer Mask box on the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer panel. It is the black box in the middle of the layer panel.
- Choose the brush you want to use to fix the problem from the Brush Tool in the Toolbar.
- Change the Foreground Color to Black color. You can find it on the same Toolbar column as the Brush Tool. You use black color to paint the part that you don’t want to be affected by the Hue/Saturation.
- Use the brush to paint the area around the teeth that you want to remove.
Note: you can use the left bracket key ([ ) and right bracket key ( ]) to adjust the brush size faster to get the detail you like.
Note2: you also can adjust the brush opacity to get a lighter or stronger masking effect on the photo. It will affect the value of Hue/Saturation you have applied to the image previously. You might need to zoom out the photo to see the color difference. Also, you can work in detail this way.
Are You Ready to Try?
Follow our guide above to make your teeth brighter using Photoshop. However, if you think that is too difficult, you can always use the professional photo retouching services by Dropicts. Consisting of an experienced and skillful team, we always strive to deliver the best result for your photo editing needs. You can visit our official website at Dropicts.com to learn more about the best service we have for you.
