Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Whitening Teeth

If you’ve ever enjoyed a big cup of coffee or a Texas-sized goblet of red wine and then had your picture taken, you’ll want to bookmark this page. Stained teeth are even more embarrassing than shiny spots, but they’re super easy to fix (see Figure 11-9). You could start by selecting the teeth—the Quick Selection tool works well—and then feather the selection, though it’s much easier to apply the lightening to the entire image, hide it with a layer mask, and then reveal the lightening atop the teeth using the Brush tool.

Here’s how to make those pearly whites, well, white:

1. Open an image and zoom in so you can see the subject’s teeth.

   Press ⌘-+ (Ctrl-+ on a PC) to zoom in.

2. Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer.

   Click the half-black/half-white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Hue/Saturation.

3. Lower the Adjustment layer’s saturation and increase its lightness.

   In the Properties panel, drag the Saturation slider to the left and the Lightness slider to the right. Keep an eye on your image to make sure you don’t make the person’s teeth unnaturally white. The whole image lightens as you drag the sliders, but don’t worry, you’ll fix that in the next step.

4. Fill the Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer’s mask with black.

   Since you’ll reveal this adjustment only on your subject’s teeth, it’s faster to fill the mask with black than to paint with black to hide the adjustment from the rest of the image. So activate the mask and then press ⌘-I (Ctrl+I) to invert the mask. Photoshop ...