At R-Design we work frequently with photographers, and most of us on staff dabble in photography as well. With digital cameras crashing through the marketplace at the speed of light, many people who used to take pictures for fun are now also learning to edit their photos like pros.

I asked some professionals, “How do you typically touch up a photo of a person before it goes to print?”
Common answers included “Adding eyelashes”, “whitening teeth” and “making the eyes sparkle”.

For those of you at home who now have Photoshop, I offer these crash courses on touching up eyes and teeth of a photo’s subject to add a dash of SUPERSTAR. The software I am using is Photoshop CS2, a.k.a. Photoshop 9.0.2.

Lesson 1: Teeth Whitening.      

Tool used: Dodge. (Note: There are a few ways to lighten teeth, just like there are a few ways to do most things in Photoshop. But to me, making teeth lighter is usually a fast, minor detail. So we are going to treat it as such.)

Here are some ordinary teeth. But what if you want them to be extraordinary? Maybe you read that study about sales reps with whiter teeth closing more deals?? Here’s my quick fix:

Step 1: Open the Photo in Photoshop.

Step 2: Select your magic wand tool. (The shortcut to doing this is pressing W for Wand.)

Step 3: Set your wand tool to a semi-low tolerane level, and click on the teeth. (explained: Once the wand tool is selected, your menu allows you to select a Tolerance level. The tolerance uses a mathematical process to look at the pixels of the image and determine which colors are similar and which are not. With a high level of tolerance, more like pixels will be selected by the wand. With a low level of tolerance, fewer will be selected. In the case of this photo, the white of the teeth is not surrounded by other white objects in the photo. Any low level of tolerance will select JUST the teeth, and avoid the lips and dark hollow of the mouth.)
By selecting a tolerance of 30, I can click on the front tooth of this girl and almost all of the surrounding teeth are selected because they are the same color. You know what is selected because it suddenly has a dotted outline moving around it, also know as Photoshop’s dancing ants. By holding down the shift key and clicking once more on a back tooth, the teeth are well selected.

Step 4: Select your dodge tool (press O). The dodge tool is used to lighten pixels. Once it is selected, you can adjust the rate at which it lightens by setting the ‘exposure’. For this example I would like to sweep my brush along the teeth once and adjust them all at the same time. Because of this, I have enlarged the brush size to 16. The dodge settings I chose were Range: Midtones, Exposure: 47%.

Step 5: Quickly wipe the dodge brush across the teeth. The dodge tool is sensitive to pressure. If you hold the mouse button down on one tooth longer than the others, that tooth will be whiter. Try to use even pressure and just glide the mouse in one short stroke.
 

That’s it! Here is my result.

 

Here is a before and after shot for you:

Now we can move on to Editing Eyes. Let’s make them sparkle and shine!!
There are many parts to eyes, and depending on what needs some touching up the following steps can be used individually or in conjunction with one another.
Part 1. Sclera cleanup (that’s the eye-ball whites)

Step 1: Select your magic wand tool. (The shortcut to doing this is pressing W for Wand.) Use the magic wand to select the eye whites in the photo. If you need to select more than one area, select a part, then hold down shift while selecting another part. On this photo I used a tolerance of 30.

 

Step 2: Add a new blank layer (shift-ctrl-N, Click OK)

 

Step 3: Set your foreground color as white. Select the paint bucket (G) and paint the white color in the selected area on the new layer.

 

Step 4: Lower the opacity of the layer to make it more realistic. This can be done in the top right of the layers pallette and takes out the red color, but leaves the blood vessels and some shadows showing. I set mine at 45%. Then deselect the area.

Here is what I have right now:

Part 2. Iris & pupil cleanup (that’s the eye color and black middle of the eye)

To adjust eye color:

Step 1: add a new layer

Step 2: On the layer palette, change the layer’s blend mode to Soft light with the top-left drop-down arrow.

Step 3: Press D to set your colors on the tools menu to default colors.

Step 4: Select a small sized brush from the brush tool menu and lower the opacity to 20%.

Step 5: paint on the new layer to adjust the lighting around the eye:

Painting white will lighten, Painting black will darken. Lighten or darken the colored iris as needed. Paint black and darken the pupil. You can also enhance the outer rim of the iris with black – but do this carefully with a 5% or 10% brush.

I also like to add a stroke of complimentary color, like a mustard-colored bit to brown eyes or a purple hue to blue eyes.

Part 3. Catchlights

When retouching eyes, you may also want to add “catchlights”. Catchlights are bright spots that are an indication of where the light source was at the time the picture was taken, and often occur naturally or from professional portrait lighting.

Step 1: Select white as your foreground color.

Step 2: Using the circle tool, create a small, white circle on the same side of each pupil, depending on the lighting in the picture. I have 2 tips for you here. TIP 1: you may need to zoom in for this part. TIP 2: you can create one circle and then duplicate the layer and move it to the other eye to get 2 circles that are exactly the same. Catchlights are often exactly the same.

Step 3: Lower the opacity of the layers that the circles are on to make them look more natural.

In this case I used a light yellow instead of pure white and lowered the opacity of the layers to 80%. Here is what I have right now:

 

Part 4. Eyelashes
This is mainly used for female subjects, and works best on adults who wear makeup.

To add fake eyelashes, you can duplicate the area around the eye and use an ultra high unsharp mask. I usually draw fake lashes. I try to select a color with the eyedropper tool from the current eyeliner. Then I use a small brush tool or thin line tool to add fake lashes where necessary. Then I lower the opacity of the layer so they don’t look too fake.

Here I used the line tool, grouped the lines into one layer group, and lower the layer group opacity to 50%.

And as usual, here is a Before and After: