Photoshop Tutorials -- Brighter, Whiter Smiles |
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Brighter, Whiter Smiles with Photoshop
Everyone wants a brighter, whiter smile... at least that's what my television tells me every 15 minutes. This Photoshop CS2 lesson will demonstrate how you can brighten and whiten the smile in any of your digital portraits. Along the way you'll discover how to use the Magic Wand and the Lasso selection tools and you'll learn about the Hue/Saturation adjustment dialog.
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| Brighter, Whiter Smiles |
NOTE: This Photoshop lesson was created using Adobe Photoshop CS2, but the same results can be achieved in just about any version of Adobe Photoshop.
Making the Selection:
As with many of my Photoshop photo-editing tutorials, you'll start by making a selection so that the selected area can be corrected without disturbing any other areas of the photograph. In this case the Magic Wand tool (see figure 24.1) will be used. The reason is that the Magic Wand tool is great for selecting oddly shaped areas, such as someone's teeth.
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| figure 24.1 |
The Magic Wand tool:
The Magic Wand tool is a bit tricky to understand, but well worth learning about. Once you've selected the Magic Wand tool from the Toolbar take a look at the options (see figure 24.2) which can be found just below the menu choices in the main Photoshop window.
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| figure 24.2 |
In figure 24.1 you can see that I've set the selection type to "Add to Selection" and the Tolerance to 20 (the default value is 32). By default Anti-alias and Contiguous (pixels must be touching one another and not separated by any space) are on and Sample All Layers is off.
The "Add to Selection" setting means that I can click different ares of the image and the tool will keep adding to my selection rather than creating a new selection each time...
The Tolerance setting defines how pixels are selected when you click with the tool on your image. When you click in your image the underlying pixel is selected, the tool then checks pixels around the perimeter (i.e. neighboring pixels are checked to see whether or not they fit within the tolerance you've set). If any pixels falls within the tolerance (0 means no other pixels will be selected and 255 means all pixels will be selected) that pixel is added to the selection and the tool keeps checking neighboring pixels.
Figure 24.3 shows the same area being selected with the Magic Wand tool using varying Tolerance settings.
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| figure 24.3 |
You can see from figure 24.3 that increasing the Tolerance value increases the number of pixels the tool selects. Ideally, you'd like to set the tolerance such that all of the pixels you need are selected... ideally :) What I do is choose a setting (the default setting of 32 is a good place to start) and click in the area that I want selected. If too many pixels are selected, I choose Edit, Undo (CTRL-Z, of course, for you keyboard shortcut users out there), lower the Tolerance value and click again. I won't do that if too few pixels are selected, though, which is why I set the tool to "Add to Selection" mode. If too few pixels are selected I can simply click again in the area that I want selected and have extra pixels added to those already selected.
In fact, after deciding on a Tolerance setting of 20 and placing a few clicks on the teeth I want selected, I have the selection you can see in figure 24.4.
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| figure 24.4 |
The Lasso tool:
You can see from figure 24.4 that the selection is pretty good. It does need a couple of small adjustments, though. I found the problem by zooming-in with the Zoom tool.
The trouble is that some edges have too little of the teeth selected and some edges have too much of the gums selected... I wonder if Dentists go through this :)
Correcting those slight misses from the Magic Wand can be accomplished fairly easily with another Photoshop selection tool... the Lasso. The Lasso tool is easy to operate... though it is easier if you have a graphic tablet and pen, but a good job can be had with the mouse, too.
To operate the Lasso tool, set the selection type to either "Add to Selection" or "Subtract from Selection", (leave the other settings at their defaults, for now) depending on whether you need to add or remove areas from your selection and simply click-and-drag around the areas that you want added to or subtracted from your selection.
In figure 24.5 the Lasso tool is being used to subtract some of the pink gums area that was selected by the Magic Wand tool.
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| figure 24.5 |
Brightening the Smile:
Once you're satisfied with the selection you've created, save it by choosing Select, Save Selection... In the Save Selection dialog box choose the document that you're working on and give the New channel a name. I named the channel "Teeth" for obvious reasons.
With the selection still active choose Select, Feather and enter 1 in the dialog box. Doing so will smooth out the transition between the original photo and the edits to the smile that are about to be made.
I prefer to keep my edits as re-editable as possible and to that end this correction will be accomplished with the use of an adjustment layer. Better still, because a selection is active, a mask will be automatically generated and the correction will be limited to that selected area.
To make the adjustment to the smile, choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation... and click OK in the dialog box that pops up.
To correct the smile in your digital photographs adjust the Saturation to the left (i set it to -67 for this image) and adjust the Lightness to the right (I set the value to 20). Decreasing the saturation removes the color and doing so removes the yellowish stains that many adults have from tea, coffee, etc. Increasing the lightness obviously brightens the smile.
Figure 24.6 shows my final result and the settings I used.
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| figure 24.6 |
TIP: It's best to zoom-out and take a look at your image in its entirety to see how the correction fits in. The idea is to brighten and whiten the smile of your portrait subject while keeping the photo as original-looking as possible.
As always, make sure that you save a copy of your image as a .psd file so that you can come back to it later if necessary and make any subsequent changes or re-edits.
That's it for now... Be sure to check out some of our other Photoshop tutorials.
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We'd like to hear from you... If there are any Photoshop techniques you'd like to see covered, send us an e-mail.
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