How to Make Teeth Whiter With Photoshop

Photoshop is a favorite program for many graphic designers because of all the different techniques for manipulating photos within the program. When working on photos, it is simple to use Photoshop to get rid of that yellowish tint many have on their teeth due to smoking or coffee stains. A few clicks and the teeth will look as white as ever. These steps to whiten teeth will use Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a PC.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. 
    

   Open Photoshop on your computer by double-clicking on the icon on your desktop or clicking on the start button and then on the program. Find where you have stored the photograph you want to work on by going under "File" and "Open."

2. 
    

   Open your tool palette by clicking on the "Window" tab and "Tools." Click on the "Zoom" tool, which is the one that looks like a magnifying glass. Click on the picture and increase its size so that you can see the teeth area closely. Hold down the "ALT" key on your keyboard to zoom in or let go to zoom out of the picture with your clicks.

3. 
    

   Click on the "Lasso" tool, which is the button at the top that pictures a rope lasso. Click on the photo around the edges of the teeth, hold down the mouse button and drag to loosely draw around all the teeth. Once back at the beginning, let go of the mouse and a highlighted area will appear around the teeth where you just drew your lasso.

4. 
    

   Add areas into your highlighted area that you may have missed by holding down the "Shift" key on the keyboard and redrawing the lasso around those areas. Once you let go, the highlighted area will change to include the area you just addressed. If you had highlighted too much and included part of the lips, you can hold down the "ALT" key and redraw the lasso. When you let go, the highlighted part will adjust by subtracting that area from the selection.

5. 
    

   Change the mode of the photo to "CMYK" once you have all the teeth selected. To do that, click on the "Image" tab at the top and scroll down to "Mode" and over to "CMYK". Hold down the "CTRL" and "M" keys on the keyboard to bring up the "Curves" window. Change the "Channel" section to "Cyan" first. Click in the middle of the graph and drag the line either up or down (depending on your settings) to remove cyan from the highlighted area. Make sure your "Preview" box is checked so you can see your photo changing. Change the "Channel" to "Magenta" and "Yellow" and repeat the step for each. After you have the teeth looking naturally white, click "OK."

Tips & Warnings

• Removing more "Yellow" in the "Curves" window than the other colors will make the most difference in the whitening of the teeth.