PearlyWhites Plugin review

A Photoshop plugin for whitening teeth in photos

The PearlyWhites Photoshop plug-in from Image Trends basically does one thing and does it well, which is often the mark of a useful idea.

It detects teeth (and also the whites of your eyes) in your photo and whitens/brightens them…

Article Index

• What does it do?
• Conclusions
• Summary

Update December 2010 – New version with full 64 bit support

Whiten teeth in photos

The Apple Mac version of the plugin is covered here, but the PC windows version works the same.

What’s in the software?

The plug-in has no controls or settings, you just run it – it does its stuff and that’s it.

I’m not a specialist portrait photographer, so whitening people’s teeth is something that I rarely think about.

However on the few occasions that I have had to do fix photographs, then I’ve noticed that for a good job you have to do a bit more than just apply the sponge tool in Photoshop. It’s all to easy to end up with teeth that look more at home on a piano keyboard.

Move your mouse over the image to see the effect of the plug-in

The plugin looks for tooth coloured areas surrounded by skin tones – these get lightened.

There is an excellent tutorial on incorporating the plugin into a Photoshop action to automate the process at the Image Trends web site, it includes lots of examples and how to use the history brush and the plugin for batch processing.

You can increase the effect by running the plugin a second time.

One thing to be wary of is that the plugin can affect other areas of images. Note the effect on the model’s blond hair in the shot below (having a bit of a rest during a shoot).

If I needed to limit the action of the plugin then I’d either apply it to a selected area or use the history brush, or a masked layer.

Not a problem, but worth knowing about before you apply the plugin to a whole folder of images.

If you look at the top image you can also see that it can slightly highlight reflections as well. I’d probably use both this and the ShineOff plugin as well, which is designed to reduce skin reflections (ShineOff review)

If you try the plug-in on cropped images like the one below, then it doesn’t work as well (it has to analyse more of an image to work well) The example shows the whitening produced from running the plugin on the whole image.

Conclusions

Simple to use and it just works. I may not -ever- do weddings or studio portrait work, but I do lots of corporate photography and pictures of the CEO usually go down better with a bit of Photoshop work ;-)

Summary

A very easy to use function – with a bit of care, potentially quite useful if you have lots of teeth to whiten :-)

Price (on-line purchase) $49.95- a free (watermarked) demo is available.

Available (download) in both Mac and Windows PC versions at $49.95

Supports: RGB, 8 bits and 16 bits

Applications:

Operating Systems:

Windows Vista, XP, NT, 2000, Mac OSX