Mallow smile

Paintman (e2 Member)

6

2 Jan 2013 - 4:49 PM

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The best way to whiten teeth and the whites of eyes is to make a selection of them using the Lasso tool and choose curves on the adjustment panel situated in the layers panel. You're looking for the circle icon which is half black/half white at the bottom. Click this and choose curves from the fly out menu. You should now have a curves layer with its own mask and only the whites of the eyes and teeth selected in white. The rest will be black. White reveals, black conceals is the way to remember how a mask works.

Feather the mask by 1 to 5 pixels depending on how large the file size is so you don't get a sharp edge once you make the adjustments. Lighten the selected areas by pushing the diagonal line up slightly on the curves graph. If you do it too much it will look unnatural but you can lower the opacity to suit later. Now choose the Blue channel on the curves adjustment layer. You'll notice in the drop down menu that there is an RGB channel, a Red channel, a Green channel and a Blue channel and these work by changing the colour of the photo ( or selected area ) to the same colour as the channel name when the graph is pushed up. The colour changes to its complementary when the curve is pushed down, red becomes cyan, green becomes magenta and blue becomes yellow. An easy way to remember the channels opposites is to think:

R------C
G------M
B------Y
--------K


K stands for black and can be disregarded in this instance.

Push the curve on the blue channel up very slightly in the middle of the line until the selected areas look better. Now choose the green channel and push this up even more slightly until it looks better. You can play with the channels to change the colour balance of the teeth and eyes to your hearts content until you get the hang of it. I tend not use the red channel for this operation as it doesn't help the look of whiteness in the teeth. If the teeth look too bright or white try lowering the opacity slider on the layers panel until they look natural and work with the photo. You're not trying to get a Donny Osmond in UV light effect with the teeth, so some restraint is in order

Hope that helps.

Regards, Alan.

Constructive Critique!