This fine fellow's name is David. He's going to show up in a chapter of the book I am working on called Pearls of Honor. From all accounts, David is a huge proponent for the Survivors of Pearl Harbor, working tirelessly to organize their appearances at the many parades they attend in and around San Diego. So I would say a guy with so much dedication to honoring these American Treasures should look his best in the book.

Dana (the book's author) snapped this picture on a trolley after one of the parades. It's a little dark, but the biggest issue is the obvious yellow cast to David's teeth.

NOTE: You can click the pictures to see them larger in a new window. I write these tutorials with my Beginning Photoshop students in mind, so they may seem overly simplified for advanced users. If you have a question, please email me using the text link at the top right of the blog.

First, I applied an overall curves adjustment layer to correct the slightly flat color. To do this without so much guess work, follow a tip I picked up from Photoshop User's July/August 2000 issue. I know that seems ancient, but it works like a charm in every version of Photoshop up to CS4. First, create a new threshold adjustment layer. (At the bottom of the layers palette is a little half black/half white circle icon. click and hold then choose threshold.) Your image will turn into this crazy black and white map. Drag the slider all the way to the left to find the blackest point in the image.

Most of the black will disappear out of the image. If it all goes away, slide back to the right slowly until some comes back. Select the eyedropper tool in the toolbar and holding the shift key, click on one of the black regions. It will leave a little cross hair marker that says the number one next to it.


Then drag all the way to the right to find the lightest point. Now, some images have blown out highlights — areas that have turned white because of being too close to the flash or because of overexposure, so use your judgment here to select what SHOULD be the brightest point. Again, shift click with the eyedropper to make a sample point.


Then, click cancel in CS3 or throw the adjustment layer away in CS4. You only needed the sample points. Make a new curves adjustment layer. Click the BLACK eyedropper on the left hand side of the curves palette. Then click the the sample point that was the dark one. Then click the WHITE eyedropper and click the light sample point. Then click the gray eyedropper. Now comes the bit of guesswork. You need to find something in your image that is as close to neutral gray as possible. You may need to click around some until you find something that works. Watch any areas that are white and skin tones to make sure you are not introducing a color cast. In this example, once I had the three spots selected, I manually adjusted the curve upwards on the bottom to lighten the shadows. See how I used another point to lock the curve on the top so only the shadows were affected?

Okay, the looks good, but his teeth are still yellow. Now we need to apply a second curves adjustment with a layer mask to move the teeth from yellow to blue and lighten them.

Create a new curves adjustment layer. On the layers palette, you see the curves adjustment and the mask thumbnail. It starts out all white. Make sure you have the mask selected (click the mask thumbnail and look for a black border around it in the layers palette) and create a selection around the teeth. I zoomed in and used the lasso to draw this one. Invert the selection, add a very slight feather and fill the layer mask (NOT THE IMAGE LAYER) with black. This will turn the layer mask thumbnail almost entirely black, except for the teeth.


Now click the twirl down where it says RGB and choose the blue channel. Since yellow is the opposite of blue, we need to ADD BLUE to cancel out the yellow cast on the teeth. Pick a point in just about the center of the curve and drag upwards until the teeth look a more natural shade of ivory. You may need to go back to the composite RGB curve and drag it upwards as well. If you have "bleed" out of your mask and the lips are turning blue, make sure you have the layer mask thumbnail selected and use a small brush to paint with black (hide effect) or white (show effect) on the layer mask to tidy it up.


And here's David ready to show up in the book.


I hope this was helpful.

Thanks to Dana for letting use his pictures for tutorials. He's a great guy and a wonderful client!