Whiten teeth in photoshop

When you think of a beautiful smile there are a couple of things which will probably come to mind in most people and in nearly all cases white teeth tends to be a part of it, even though many people already have great teeth these days compared to what your great grandparents might have had [...]

When you think of a beautiful smile there are a couple of things which will probably come to mind in most people and in nearly all cases white teeth tends to be a part of it, even though many people already have great teeth these days compared to what your great grandparents might have had a hundred of years ago it’s never enough. Teeth have to be as white as possible for many, unfortunately as time passes by your teeth slowly turn yellow along as well.

How do they do it then in the smiles on the pictures? Do they have such wonderfully white teeth or is there some trick to it? Well, you could place your bets on tell sell here and hope their teeth whitening products help but you could also open up Photoshop again and take the easy way out. After this tutorial you will be able to turn those yellow teeth white again without even breaking a sweat.

Getting started

Now before we start you will need a picture first, you can take one of yourself, a friend, family member or just one picked from Google it doesn’t really matter. If you want you can also sign up on a stock photography site like stock.xchng and download something from there, the good thing about stock.xchng is that unlike many other stock photography sites it’s free so a great resource for starting out with.

Now above you might have already seen the smile which I ended with and has still quite a natural look to it, but just to show where it came from so you don’t think I simply took some girl with perfectly with teeth from the net you can see the original teeth on the left. As you might see her teeth don’t look too bad, but it just doesn’t look like the kind of teeth you’d see on celebrity’s right?

A quick recap

The people who also read the changing eye color tutorial I wrote last week might remember the use of quick mask, but for those which didn’t here’s a quick recap.

First of all you’ll want to create a new layer, in order to do this quickly you can press ctrl+shift+n (layer > new > layer… in case the shortcut doesn’t work).

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Now it’s time to start using the quick mask tool, easiest way to do so is press Q, if that doesn’t work don’t be afraid you can find the button in the image on the right, look at it in the lower part of your left toolbar.

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Now select a brush and adjust it’s size, as you start coloring in the eye you should be seeing it turning up red if you went into the quick mask successfully.

Just like when working on the eye it’s best to zoom in quite far again here as well and you might want to size down the brush quite a bit to reach those little parts of the teeth in the back of the mouth. Once you’re finished with the quick mask you should have a result which ended up something like the following.

Rounding things up

Let’s exit quick mask again and press shift+ctrl+I (select>inverse), to make it easy for yourself you could simply fill it up with a white paint, after all whiter teeth is what we are aiming for. To prevent the teeth from being one big chunk of whiteness we’ll now set the blending mode to soft light and you can immediately see your result improve already.

The last thing you might want to do now is alter the opacity, as you lower the opacity the teeth might become less white but they do get a more real feel to it.

If everything went alright you should have your teeth whitened up in a fashion like you can see above, click on the image and you’ll see the full before and after picture applied to the girl’s face for a better view.

Still got some questions or just want to say thanks, feel free to leave me a comment, it’ll be greatly appreciated. Good luck with your work in Photoshop and don’t be afraid to experiment.