- Liquify Filter: Retouching Facial Features the Easy Way
- Feather & Free Transform: Making Facial Features Symmetrical
- Feather Selection: Trimming Eyebrows
- Brush Tool: Removing Eye Veins
- Healing Brush & Patch Tools: Removing Blemishes
- Apply Image & Gaussian Blur: The Secret to Great-Looking Skin
- Liquify Filter: Liquify’s Other Killer Tool for Retouching Body Parts
- Liquify Filter: Creating Beautiful Teeth
- Pinch Filter: Reducing Jaws and Jowls
- Puppet Warp: Repositioning Body Parts Using Puppet Warp
- Free Transform: Covering Studio Mistakes
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Liquify Filter: Creating Beautiful Teeth
If someone is smiling in a photo I’ve taken, I always take a few moments to make sure their teeth line up nicely, without any distracting gaps between them. I’ll fix those that look too pointy or too short compared to the teeth on either side, or anything that might draw attention. We use the Liquify filter for this because it lets you literally move the teeth around, tooth by tooth, as if they were made of a thick liquid. You can just kind of push and pull them in the direction you need them to go. Here’s how it works:
Step One:
With the image we want to retouch open in Photoshop, let’s evaluate what we need to do: The front tooth on the left has a little notch out of it on the bottom right, as does the second tooth from the left. The front tooth on the right has a tiny gap on the bottom left, and I would flatten a few teeth and, generally, just try to even them all out a bit. Her teeth are actually pretty nice, but the angle of this shot makes them look more uneven than they are. So, go under the Filter menu and choose Liquify.
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Step Two:
When the Liquify dialog appears (seen here; I’m only showing the left side because we’re not going to touch any of the sliders or controls on the right—this is all brush work), start by zooming in (press Command-+ [plus sign; PC: Ctrl-+] a few times. I zoomed in to 200%). Then, make sure you have selected the first tool at the top of the Toolbox on the left (the Forward Warp tool [W]; it lets you nudge things around like they were made of molasses). The key to working with teeth is to make a number of very small moves—don’t just get a big brush and push stuff around. We’ll start on that front tooth on the left (I zoomed in on the inset, so you can see the before tooth and the little notch on the bottom right side that’s making the bottom of the tooth look uneven). Now, make your brush size just a little larger than that notch (use the Left/Right Bracket keys to change the brush size), and gently nudge the area just above that notch downward to fill in the area, making the bottom of the tooth even. That’s what you see me doing here—nudging the part of the tooth above the notch down to fill in the notch, so it looks even (it’s easier than it sounds).
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Step Three:
Now, let’s work on the front tooth on the right. It’s just a tiny notch at the bottom left, so shrink your brush size way down, then click right above the notch and gently nudge down a few strokes to fill it in (as shown here). Next, we’re going to do more of the same, so let’s work on the notch on bottom right of the second tooth from the left. Again, resize your brush to the size of the notch, click right above it, and drag down to fill it in. Making your brush size just a little bigger than the area you want to adjust is one of the big secrets to mastering retouching with Liquify. If you get into trouble, it’s probably because your brush is too big.
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Step Four:
That’s basically the process—just move from tooth to tooth. To make a tooth longer, click inside it near the bottom and nudge it down. In looking at the two front teeth (now that their bottoms are pretty straight), I see that the tooth on the left is overlapping the one on the right a bit. So, let’s gently nudge the right edge of the tooth on the left over to the left a bit, so they don’t appear to overlap as much (as shown here). My goal is to make everything pretty straight all the way across. A dentist would cringe if they saw what I did here, because it’s not “dentically” correct (hey, I just coined another new term), but we don’t have to worry about the teeth actually working to eat food, they just have to work in the context of our photo. To see a quick before/after, turn off/on the Preview checkbox at the bottom right of the dialog.
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