How to Remove Skin Blemishes and Whiten Teeth in Photoshop
In this tutorial, I am going to explain how to correct skin blemishes and whiten the teeth using Photoshop tools. Of course, there are numerous ways to do this. These procedures have been done and described over and over again but I am going to describe one of the easiest, fastest and the most widely applied. Bear in mind that, first of all, you need to apply all the color correction and then proceed with repairing the desired details.
The photo we’ll be using looks like this:
Now you need to create a new layer by clicking on the new layer icon in the layers palette and rename it to ‘skin correction’ for example. Then select the Spot Healing Brush Tool from the tools palette. Normally, this tool works only with the layer that is selected at the moment, so you will need to make sure that the Sample All Layers option is checked before you proceed. Furthermore, in many cases, you can get better results with this tool if you change the Brush mode from Normal to Lighten.
Having done this, you just need to click on the spots that need to be corrected. Choose the suitable brush diameter and start fixing the spots. You can also click and drag on the areas that are larger than the spots and that also need correcting, thus fixing the large areas with one move. The tool replaces the problematic spots with good texture from the vicinity of the spot. So if the tool doesn’t correct the spot at first, hit undo and try again and the software will randomly choose a texture from a different area to correct the spot.
The problematic areas after the correction process will look something like this.
And now for the teeth. For this part of the correction, you will need to work in the quick mask mode. Simply click on the toggle Quick Mask mode icon (or hit Q on your keyboard) and by double clicking you’ll be able to select a nice masking color. For this photo, I’ll be using a nice green color.
With quick mask mode on, select the paint brush and start painting over the teeth. This is the most important part of the process so select a smaller brush and paint carefully over the teeth.
When you’ve painted over the teeth, switch off the Quick Mask mode and you’ll see the selection of everything outside the teeth area. You need to invert this selection by going to Select > Inverse or simply hit Shift + Ctrl + I. When you have selected the teeth, make a new layer by going to Layer > New > Layer via Copy. Rename the layer to Teeth, for instance, and put it above the skin correction layer.
Then go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and select the Yellows from the menu. We need to remove the yellow from the teeth, so in the Yellows channel, move the Saturation slider down to about -80. You’ll notice that the teeth are now much whiter. However, to enhance the brightness of the teeth, you might select the Dodge tool with the diameter much larger than the teeth themselves. Since you’re working on the teeth layer only, the size of the brush won’t affect the background of the image. Go over the teeth with the Dodge tool and brighten them up as much as you want.
Bear in mind that this is not necessarily the definite procedure. You can experiment with the Hue/Saturation sliders, depending on the overall tint of your photo. So, the photo after the skin correction and the whitening of the teeth looks like this:
A tutorial by Bonifacio Cruz
