How to remove butter teeth (yellow teeth) in Photoshop CS5

A few years ago while I was teaching Photoshop, a designer for a car dealership asked me if there was an easy way to remove  the yellow from the teeth of his used car salesman photos he had on there site. I  laughed and responded that it is an easy fix.
The reason I call it butter teeth is because When you go to the movies and eat popcorn that has a little too much butter on it, your teeth look all buttery. If you are unfamiliar with using Quick mask mode in Photoshop, this would be an excellent introduction to using this feature
as it is one of the more versatile ways to make a selection, since it utilizes the brush tool.

Follow along this tutorial to learn how to remove yellow from teeth. you can use my photo if you wish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lets open up the picture of the butter teeth you have.

Step 1- the first thing we need to do is select the teeth.
We are going to be using the Quick mask mode to make our selection, which uses your brush to paint your selection.
at the bottom of the tools panel double click on the edit in quick mask mode button to look at our options

 

Select the option to for Color Indicates Selected areas.
Using this option when you paint with black it will paint a selection (seen in red).
when you paint with white it will remove from your selection

 

That way when we paint with our brush it will paint the teeth red.

Step 2 - paint the teeth. Zoom in (ctrl +) on the teeth and paint all
the yellow teeth red like so:

 

To toggle in and out of normal/Quick mask edit modes you can hit the Q on your keyboard.  In Normal Edit mode, you
will see dancing ants around your selection.
this will help you in making sure your selection is accurate.
So hit Q and with the dancing ants surrounding your teeth hit Ctrl J to copy the teeth to its on layer.

Step 3 - take the yellow out. click on the adjustments layer button at the bottom of the layers panel
and select Hue/Saturation.

 

 

We need to take the yellow only out of the teeth(desaturate), So  we need to take the yellow only out of the teeth and not the
rest of the photo. Click  on the create clipping mask button at the bottom of the adjustments panel.

Now from the  color drop down men select yellows and move the saturation slider to the left to remove the yellow.
My teeth have a little red in them as well so I select red from the drop down menu and repeat the process to remove the red.
Pay attention to the color of the teeth as you move the saturation slider to much Desaturation and you teeth will look grey.

here is my result:

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