At a recent Photoshop users group
we talked about brightening the teeth in a portrait that was taken. I will
never say I am a good portrait photographer (this is an image I took at NECCC in
2005 which has a number of problems but does have teeth), but I can review how
we used layers and a layer mask to accomplish this.
I will start off by saying that I
talk to my self a lot while working with Photoshop. I will say out loud what I
am trying to do. So I start here by saying that I would like to have the teeth
brighter and just have the bright teeth show from another layer. Also being
lazy (and to help reduce the chance for errors) I will create the lighter layer
below the layer that I will use for the rest of the face. I always like to
leave my original image alone so I will create two copies of my background
layer and name them.
Notice that I named the layer
above the background layer white teeth, and the top
layer is called final face. This will help me keep it straight in my mind what
I want to do with each layer. So next I will turn the eye off on the final face
layer so I can see what I am doing on the layer below it and select the white
teeth layer to work with. You can use Brightness/Contrast or Levels from
“Image>Adjustments” and in this case I chose Levels. I changed the white
point to make the teeth brighter.
Now that I have bright teeth I
turn the eye on for my final face layer and select that layer. On the bottom of
the layers palette I chose the layer mask icon to create a layer mask for the
final face layer, and make sure that the mask is selected to be active. I zoom
in on the mouth so the teeth fill most of the frame. No to actually mask
something I make my foreground color black and choose the brush tool. I adjust
the size of the brush to be small compared to the size of the teeth and paint
over the teeth (remember we are painting onto the layer mask, and not the image
for the layer).
Someone asked me how to do you see
what you have for a make? An easy way to see that you are masking is to turn
off the background and bright teeth layers. You will get something like the
following image and you can see that I have only painted a mask for the teeth.
Now in the last image you can see
the difference between the original image and the one where we have brightened
the teeth.