Teeth Whitening with Curves

Posted on September 20, 2008 by Phil   1 comment

Don’t worry I will be writing a tutorial to cover Curves in all its glory but for now I thought I’d add this in for all you budding photo retouchers out there.

Tutorial image:

Yellow Teeth

Step 1:

As you can see we have a picture of a pretty girl, but, it has to be said her teeth look rather yellow. So lets fix it! Open your image in Microsoft paint, just kidding, Photoshop and enter quick mask mode by hitting ‘Q’. using a small brush with the hardness set to around 60% and your foreground color set to black paint in her teeth as below.

Step 2:

Hit ‘Q’ again to exit QuickMask and you should have her teeth selected with the marching ants. Now click on the half white/half black circle at the bottom of the layers palette and select Curves from the menu. Before we make any adjustments in Curves make sure you have Preview selected so we can see the result of our adjustments as we make them.

Step 3:

Now we need to make our adjustments. Select the Blue channel from the drop down list at the top of the Curves dialogue box and pull the centre of the line directly up to somewhere around the centre of the grid square above the centre lines as below.

Step 4:

Now choose the Green channel and adjust it slightly as below to give the teeth a more realistic tone and take out some of the blue tint from the last adjustment.

Click ok to exit Curves and you should see that she now has a lovely set of natural looking pearly whites. Turn the curves layer off and on to see just how much of a difference this little adjustment has really made.