Brighter, Whiter Smiles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

figure 24.6

3D Leaf

How to Create a 3D Leaf from a Texture Photograph

Step 1

To begin, you'll need to find a photograph texture of a leaf. I have chosen this one from lostandtaken.com by a a photographer named Caleb Kimbrough.

Step 2

Load your new found texture into a new project. With the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) selected, Right-click on your layer in the artboard and select Free Transform. Once you have done that right-click on the texture again and select Warp. I have labeled each corner respectively as we will be moving them around quite a bit.

Step 3

Now that you have your layer in Warp mode, click and drag the corner (a) down 1/3 of your grid.

Step 4

Now click and drag the corner (point c) up 1/3 of your grid. Already our leaf is beginning to take on it's natural form.

Step 5

Each corner has 2 arms that you can move in order to manipulate your layer even further. Pull the corner's (point a) left arm down as shown below.

Step 6

You should give a sharper edge to your leaf. Something like this. Press Enter to finalize the Warp.

Step 7

You should have a sharp point on your leaf after the last several steps. However, your point may be a bit bent due to the Warp Tool curling. Fix this by using the Polygonal Laso Tool (L), selecting the excess curl and pressing the Delete key.

Step 8

Now lets focus on the other end of the leaf. Use the Warp Tool again (see Step 2) and drag point d as shown in the picture below. You'll want to get both of the arms of point d to be parallel.

Step 9

Now do the same with the top-right corner (point b). Also, if you want you can tweak the leaf into whatever position you require by holding your mouse down and dragging the inner grid, as well as the other points.

Step 10

To add a bit of additional perspective Right-click on your leaf and select Free Transform. Now hold Alt + Shift and drag the top-right corner, then move it left a bit. This will give the leaf a bit of distance perspective.

Step 11

If you want to make the leaf drop at its point, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and select only the left half of the leaf. Then proceed to Free Transform > Warp. This will allow you to move that half of the leaf without warping the right half. Make sure not to move the points that are in contact with the leaf that is not selected as this will cause a tear between the two pieces.

Step 12

Next, duplicate the layer with your leaf on it, drag that layer below your original leaf layer. Warp it a little to show some discrepancy. Repeat this process as many times as your desire. Play with it and have fun.

Step 13

On each layer you can add a simple drop shadow by double-clicking on the layer and checking the box labelled Drop Shadow. To give leaves even more depth, make sure you adjust the Distance, Size, and Opacity accordingly. The larger leaf has an Opacity of 63%, a Distance of 299px, and a Size of 84px (this is on an artboard sized at 2590px by 1943px at 72px per inch). If you have a leaf that is directly on top of another, you will want to have the distance significantly lower, as well as the size. It should be more sharp and distinct.

Step 14

Next I added a quick and easy Bevel and Emboss. It is often frowned upon to use this but it gets the job done quick. You can paint the sunlight hitting the leaf if you desire, but this is only an intermediate tutorial.

Double-click on the desired layer and check the box Bevel and Emboss. Change your Depth to 100%, Size to 65px, and Soften to 0px. Also you may want to lower the Opacity of the Highlight Mode as well as the Shadow Mode.

Step 15

You may want to add some depth of field. To do this I recommend you use a simple Gaussian Blur. Select the leaf that is below the rest of them. Right-click on the layer in the Layer Window and select Convert to Smart Object. Now select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to 2.6 pixels.

A Smart Object will allow you to change the settings of your applied filters non-destructively. If you are really thoughtful, you could do this with the Drop Shadow and the Bevel and Emboss on the leaves...repeat this process with the other leaves, but lower the blur as the leaves get closer to the largest leaf. We want that to be the focus.

You can also use the paint brush to mask the Smart Filter on the Smart Object. If you select the Smart Filter on your Smart Object layer, select the color black and paint on the artboard with the Paintbrush Tool. You will find that it removes the Gaussian Blur (or any other filter you applied to your Smart Object) in the area that you paint black. I did this with the largest leaf and left only the edges slightly blurred.

Final Image

There you have it. A quick and easy display of greenery. You can really play around with this and do a lot of different types of leaves and positioning. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. Half the fun is just messing around with the Warp tool. The final image is below. You can view it larger here.