Callihan Photography-Columbus Indiana Photographer

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How I whiten teeth in Lightroom

When you are photographing someone you want them to look their absolute best. Sometimes, little things like whitening teeth can make a big difference. Teeth don’t always look white in camera due to bad lighting, or weird shadows. Other times people just don’t have very white teeth. I know the coffee has been hard on my own teeth! I will walk you through how I easily whiten teeth in Lightroom.

Start by zooming in at least 100%. You could need to zoom in even farther if the photo was taken father away. Next select the masking symbol at the top of the development panel. It looks like a dotted outline of a circle. Take your brush and size it according to the size of the teeth. With the flow, density and feathering all at 100 brush over each tooth. Be careful not to brush over lips or gum lines if you can. Don’t worry about the back teeth as they will likely be shadowed any ways. Now that you have your mask ready you can play with the coloring. I like to slide the temperature slider toward the blue. This will neutralize the yellow coloring. Now I increase the exposure. I do this by eye so that they look natural. You definitely don’t want to overexpose. Teeth should not glow!


So in summary. Mask/Brush/cooler temperature and higher exposure. That’s it! Easy Peasy. Now if you copy the settings on to the next photo make sure you remove the mask. It likely won’t be in the right place, and it is easy to forget this step.

Thanks for reading!