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Every one wants a brighter, whiter smile. My television tells me that every 15 minutes or so, so it must be true, right

This Paint Shop Pro Photo XI lesson will demonstrate how you can give all of your portrait subjects the “hollywood star” smile of their dreams. Along the way you'll also learn how to use the Magic Wand Tool to make selections, how to save and load selections as alpha channels, how to create an Adjustment Layer and how to use the Hue/Saturation/Lightness tool.

Give your portrait subjects a brighter, whiter smile

A Note on the Toothbrush Tool

Before moving on to the actual whitening technique I'd like to point out that Paint Shop Pro Photo XI has a Toothbrush Tool (see figure 26.1).

figure 26.1 — Paint Shop Pro's Toothbrush Tool

Paint Shop Pro's Toothbrush Tool is quite powerful, but it's lacking a little in flexibility in that the only setting available is the “Strength”.

Although it's true that using the Toothbrush Tool you can whiten a smile using several mouse clicks, the “old school” technique used for this lesson only requires several mouse clicks, as well, but will yield results that are much more flexible. Not only that, but using this technique means that the changes are editable and re-editable even after saving and reopening the image file (your file must be saved as a .pspimage file for this to work).

One other issue I have with tools like the Toothbrush is that they are destructive in that they change the actual pixels of an image. If you make a change like that and save those changes over the original file you'll have no way to get back to the original. Saving the file as a copy works, but that means you now have two files to keep track of, archive, burn to CD… whatever.

In the previous Paint Shop Pro tutorial on Red Eye Removal I demonstrated how you can copy the areas that need changing to a new layer. That method solves the problem of descructive tools by working on a copy (stored on a separate layer) of the areas that need correcting. It also keeps all of the image data in one file which is nice…

For this lesson, though, I'll demonstrate how to quickly create a selection (using only a few more mouse clicks than the “one-click” Toothbrush Tool solution) to isolate the area that needs to be corrected. Once the selection is made I'll demonstrate how it can be saved so that it can be retrieved and re-edited, if necessary. Finally, I'll show you how to use that selection as a mask along with an adjustment layer to isolate and whiten the smile of any portrait subject. There's a bit to tackle, so let's get started.

Making the Selection

Because the area that needs to be selected is an odd shape the best tool to use will be the Magic Wand Tool (see figure 26.2).

figure 26.2

The Magic Wand Tool works by comparing neighboring pixels and, based on the Tolerance value, either adds the pixels to the selection or ignores them. In other words, when you click with the Magic Wand in your image the pixel beneath where you click with the mouse is selected and the pixels around that selected pixel are examined and either added to the selection, or not… from there the selection blossoms outward as neighnoring pixels are examined and added/ignored.

There are several options available for the Magic Wand. You can set the Mode, the Match Mode and the Tolerance. You can choose to use all layers and you can also choose to make the selections contiguous (pixels must be touching each other to be selected). Finally, you can set the Feather value and choose whether or not to use Anti-aliasing (if you're not sure what anti-aliasing is, check our Anti-aliasing tutorial).

The mode can be set to Replace, Add or Remove. For the initial click you can leave the default Replace setting. For subsequent clicks, though, you will want to either add to or remove from the existing selection. You'll see what I'm talking about as you start making the selection(s).

The Match Mode setting enables you to decide how pixels will be selected. Based upon:

• None
• RGB Value
• Color
• Brightness
• Perceptual
• Traditional
• All Opaque
• Opacity

I've chosen Traditional for this lesson, but feel free to explore what the other settings do. For example, Color or RGB Value might be a good choice for selecting the smile in a portrait…

The Tolerance can be set from 0 to 255. A tolerance setting of 0 will not select any pixels other than the one originally clicked on and a Tolerance setting of 255 will select all of the pixels in the image. I suggest starting with a number like 25 to see what happens. When I click the teeth in the portrait I'm using for this lesson I get some of, but not all of the teeth (see figure 26.3).

figure 26.3

I'll leave Use All Layers option off (there's only one layer in the photo I'm working with) and the Contiguous option on, so as to not select areas outside of the smile… With the Contiguous setting turned off objects similar to, but not visually connected to the teeth, such as Pearls or silver jewelry in a portrait, might be selected along with the teeth.

I'll set the feathering value (using Selection, Modify, Feather…”) a little later after the selections is complete so I'll leave that value set to 0.

Lastly, I'll leave Anti-aliasing on (again, you may want to read the Anti-aliasing tutorial to see why).

You can see from figure 26.3 that only some of the teeth have been selected. To keep selecting more of the teeth, set the Mode option for the Magic Wand to Add and simply click different areas of the teeth. Several clicks should be enough to get all of the teeth (see figure 26.4).

figure 26.4

If you zoom-in (always a good idea when modifying an image) and take a look at the selection you may notice that some unwanted areas around the gums have been selected (see figure 26.5).

figure 26.5

To fix this problem, set the Magic Wand's Mode to Remove, lower the Tolerance to about 10 and click close to the edge of the selection where it has gone out of bounds. Doing so will trim off the extra bits that were previously selected. Again, try zooming-in to make the process of clicking an area a little easier. If you find some areas that weren't selected set the Mode to Add and select those areas by clicking inside them. With a little work you'll have the teeth selected so that you can brighten them without affecting any other areas in the photograph. Before we get started with the whitening, though, it's a good idea to save the selection. It's taken a bit of time to create and it would be nice to have immediate access to it again if needed, say for further modification.

You can see my final selection in figure 26.6

figure 26.6

With the selection complete, it's advisable to soften the edges a little to make the transition between the original and the brightening/whitening less noticable. To soften up the edges of the selection, choose Selections, Modify, Feather, enter a value of 1 and click OK.

Graphics Tags:Brighter smile, photoshop