How to Whiten a Smile for a Professional Event Using Photoshop

Posted by Anonymous on

Smiles Send Messages - Make Yours Bright

Through a battle of nature versus nurture, our teeth take on an appearance all their own. In this very short post (and accompanying video), you will learn how to take a smile "from drab to fab" with a few quick steps.

Portrait of female with half of the face edited with Photoshop and text stating "Part 2 Photoshop Retouching"


Fire up Photoshop, and select a portrait, because we're starting now...

How to Select a Smile

Photoshop has a number of ways that you can select things to edit. "Power users" rarely make use of the automated tools do do their selections, but in this instance, we will. 

In your tool bar, you will find two "magical" selection tools:
  1. The Magic Wand
  2. The Quick Selection Tool
We will be using the Quick Selection Tool for this task. Activate this tool.

Screenshot of Photoshop interface showing location of the quick selection tool

Adjust your brush to a size that is about the size of the smallest tooth in the smile. Begin painting with the quick selection tool by clicking and dragging. 

Animated GIF showing the use of the quick selection tool in Photoshop

If the tool overselects or under selects, use the Shift key to paint additional selection or the Alt (Option key on Mac) to subtract from the selection. 

Feather Your Selection

With the smile selected, soften the edges of the selection by using the feather command found under the "Select" → "Modify" → "Feather" menu. A dialog box will appear. Try entering a number from 2-4.

Image of the Photoshop interface showing the location of the feather command.

With our selection now softened, we are ready to begin our whitening process.

Whitening Smiles Starts with Removing Saturation

You might be surprised at how far this one simple adjustment will go to making a smile whiter. 

To remove saturation from the smile, we will need the Sponge tool (Seen below):

Image of the Photoshop interface showing the location of the Sponge tool.

Be sure that your sponge tool is set to desaturate. I keep my flow at 50%, but feel free to play with your flow settings as you see fit (see below):

Image of Photoshop interface showing the settings for the sponge tool.

Try clicking or brushing over the teeth to reduce the saturation to a level you feel is appropriate.




Boom! Saturation removed.

Let's Dodge Those Teeth Now

Our final step is to take the Dodge tool and set it to make a small brightness adjustment. The dodge tool is located in the same group of tools as the sponge tool and the burn tool. 

The Dodge Tool is at the top of this stack.


The dodge tool will allow us to brighten the smile after we've whitened it.

Because it's easy to go overboard here, we'll set the dodge tool exposure to about 10%. With a small brush brush at 0% hardness, paint across the bottom of the teeth.

Image of Photoshop interface showing dodge tool settings for whitening teeth.

Want to See the Whole Thing in Action?

Here are all of the steps for whitening a smile using Adobe Photoshop CC 2019:





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