Hello everybody this is Yanik Chauvin and welcome to part 1 of the Portrait Make-over tutorial series and in this part we’re going to be looking at whitening teeth and eyes, now there are many ways in Photoshop to do this, but we’re going to be looking at two ways of doing this. Now here’s a lovely picture of Audrey and Chammel, they’re both professional dancers from Le’m Ballet Jazz de Monear, they were courteous enough to come and shoot for me for some Star Photography and did an awesome job so thank you guys, and then let’s get right into it. Oh, by the way, if you have other ways of doing this type of technique, please feel free to post it in the comment section of the blog so that other people can share in your wisdom, alright? Thank you.
Now the first thing we’re going to do is duplicate our layer, the way I do it is by just clicking on the layer and select Duplicate Layer and then click OK, and we can work from that, that way we won’t work on our original image. Next thing we want to do is zoom in on the parts that need to be whitened and we’re going to start with Chammel’s teeth here, boom, here we go, nice and good zoom on this. Now what you can do, you can do in two ways; you can do the lazy way which I sometimes do, but most of the time I do it the other way, but I’ll show you the lazy way first. Now the first way to whiten teeth and eyes is by using the Dodge Tool, which you’ll find here, by selecting that, now we want to make sure we have a nice size brush, and we don’t want the edge of the brush to be too hard or too soft so I usually put it around 50%, as you can see it’s at 51 here. The next thing we want to make sure is that the exposure level is at around 15 to maybe 10 and 20%, so I select 15; I’d rather go over the teeth and eyes more often with the tool than over-whitening right away, I have more control this way. So let’s do it the lazy way. Just going over the teeth trying to avoid the gums and the lips as much as possible, and one pass is good, if I do a second pass it’ll be too much, no, maybe not, that’s not bad, that’s not bad. So it’s not super precise, but it does the job, it’s still, if we back up by double clicking on the hand tool to get the general view of the picture, we get nice view, we can look at the before and after, and it’s looking good. Now zooming back, what we should do if we’re more meticulous is to select our teeth with the selection tool and then doing the Dodge, so we can do that by clicking either the Polygonal tool or the Lasso tool; now if you have a whack on the tablet, probably the Lasso tool will work well, and if not, like me, if you’re using a mouse, you use the Polygonal tool and always use a feather of 1 pixel so that the edge isn’t too hard. And then go ahead and select your teeth, now I’ll be doing a transition here and I won’t be doing a perfect job but to say sometime you’ll see the magic of video editing and by the time were here it’ll be done.
And I’m about finished right here and that didn’t take long with the magic of editing, now once you have your selection done as precisely as possible you can just go into your Dodge tool and then without even worrying about overflowing outside on the gums and lips you just do your magic. And there you go, and you can just control D for deselect and you can see what you’ve done, you can zoom back out again by double clicking on the hand, before and after and going, yeah I like that. Now let’s zoom back in, I will make sure that my selection is done and I’ll show you the second way of doing this lovely technique.
Now instead of using the Dodge tool, we’ll be using the Curves Adjustment tool, by going into Image, Adjustments, and you can select Curves or do Control M on the pc or command M on the Mac. Now what you want to do is bring your curves up, remember not too much, you don’t want to overdo it when you’re whitening teeth and eyes because it’ll look unnatural and you don’t want to have that alien fluorescent white teeth and eyes going there, I’ve seen so many shots that have been retouched that way and it just looks so unnatural, so be very, very gentle with your adjustments when you’re doing that, you want to make sure that it looks normal, alright? And once you have something good you can click on the preview to se before and after, and say, yeah I like it, good. Now one of the other things that you might find if you have pictures of people with more yellow in their teeth, either smokers or big coffee drinkers or coke drinkers, they might have the tendency of having more the yellowish tinted teeth, and you want to remove that. And the way you can do that is by going to Image, Adjustments and Hue Saturation, or Control U or command U on the Mac, and you just want to bring the saturation down to between 30 and 50%, sometimes even a bit more on other people, but in this case here, Chammel has pretty nice teeth to start off with, so 40% before and after and re-click OK, and there we go, Control D to deselect or command D on the Mac, zoom out, and there we go, before and after, looking good, and that’s how we did the teeth. Now of course, doing the eyes is the same thing, except it’s a different selection, but I want to do at least one eye so you guys can see what it’s all about. Again, I’m going to, you can do it the lazy way again, but for the eyes it’s a bit more difficult, but I have done it before, the lazy way, you might want to start with the smaller brush and then paint in and try not to overspill on the dark part of the eye, and again you don’t want to overdo it when you’re doing eyes. Alright, you can see before and after, and that’s looking good. Now again, what I suggest that you do is use your Selection tool, and going in, and selecting your eye, I’m going to do this pretty quickly now, but again try to be as precise as possible, don’t rush, you don’t want to have to redo it, remember to keep a 1 feather pixel, and then again just using the Dodge tool you can go with a bigger brush now and I’ll just go in, and there you go. Now again you can use the Curves Adjustment Layer for that, let’s see how that would look with the Curves Adjustment Layer, adjust it like so, and again, if you want to get rid off from the redness in the eye, you can go to the Hue Saturation and de-saturate the eye a little bit, before and after, okay. Control D to deselect, double click on it, and you can see the difference here if you look at before and after, we’ve only done one eye, but you can see that still looks natural but it just gives it a bit of a really, really nice pop. I hope you enjoyed part 1 of this set Portrait Make-over, stay tuned for part 2, we’ll be looking at removing blemishes and wrinkles. Alright, take care and until next time, ba-bye.