How to Enhance Eyes and Whiten Teeth in Lightroom

In this post, I’m going to show you how masking can make portrait retouching a quick and easy job! I’ll focus on two major features, eyes, and teeth (yes, I’m talking about big open smiles), but you will also take a peek at other mask editing options Lightroom offers to help you breathe new life into your photos.

As usual, this is based on one of the classes from my Lightroom Essentials course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to the full Lightroom Essentials Course as well as my 30+ additional courses on  Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Follow me through this step-by-step guide and learn all you need to know to start your journey as a skilled photographer or photo editor.

Portraits in Photography

Photography has always been an incredible art. From its origins to today’s vast digital ocean of light speed editing and sharing. It is a creative, passionate, and exciting job, with its challenges as you move on.

Portraits are one of these intimate art pieces and challenges, for sure! It’s not easy to freeze that perfect moment, in which light and expression come together to deliver an intense emotion, capture a person’s essence, or tell a life story in a single shot. Have you ever looked at a photo and the person’s eyes looked so alive and intense that you felt they were really looking back at you? Or have you even found that irresistible smile, all lit up and honest, that made you immediately return the smile? Very often, even for professionals, it takes retouching work to push an image up to Hero level. Let’s see how we can do it with Lightroom.

How to Use the Masking Tool in Lightroom

Let’s begin with the portrait below this paragraph. This image is part of the downloadable Exercise Files resources available for students in my Lightroom Essentials Course. Don’t miss it. You can use any other image you prefer, of course.

This is a studio photo, the model’s facial features and expression look appealing, but the image needs more impact, something to draw us in and catch our full attention. If you are a photography student, you may have been told that when we observe and communicate, the eyes are the first element our brain scans to further understand that person’s behavior or intentions. It’s a biological mechanism. That’s why it’s good practice to focus attention on the eyes when you start retouching a portrait photo.

Let’s have a look at how to do it with the Masking tool.

First, we click on the Masking Tool button on the toolbar to the right of our workspace. When can also use the shortcut key M to open the Masking panel.

Once the Masking panel opens, Lightroom will automatically start reading our image to detect a subject or multiple subjects. Cool, huh?

Once Lightroom finishes the detection process, it creates an avatar for each person found, so we can easily manage photos with multiple subjects. Click on the avatar thumbnail to open the Masking options. Once we hover over the thumbnail, the masked area appears shaded to help us understand which details our edits will be affecting.

Inside Person 1’s Masking panel, we find a list of preset areas for us to explore and retouch. If the Entire Person option is checked, any editing will affect the whole subject. If we are fixing a specific detail, like Facial Skin, Hair, or Teeth, we can check each one individually and take it step by step.

For this blog post’s purpose, let’s work on the eyes. Check the option Eye Sclera and click on Create to move to the next editing level. Remember the color shading from before? Now it’s only previewing the white of the eyes. That’s where the mask will be applied!

As we can see below, a new mask was successfully created, showing the face detail we’ve selected in the previous step. We can confirm that the masking was properly applied by checking the color shading or the icon that pops up over the masked area.

Nice! Let’s move on to the fun part and start changing our image’s style and impact!

How to Apply Preset Masking Options in Lightroom

This will feel a bit odd, but this is a quick and effortless way to add some strength to our  model’s sclerae: with the mask selected in the Masks panel, we move our mouse to the adjustments panel, click on the Preset drop down, and choose Whiten Teeth.

Can you tell what changed? Maybe not, but it will look clearer in a paragraph or two. It doesn’t look obvious because Lightroom is instructed to be subtle in the adjustments it sets for each image. Unless we have a specific reason to do the opposite, we should keep these changes limited as much as possible to small variations. Let’s have a look at what happened to the adjustment values when we applied the whiten teeth preset:

Only two settings were adjusted for this effect. Exposure was pushed up with an editing step value of +0,40 (on a scale from -4.00 to +4.00) and Saturation was reduced to -60 (on a scale from -100 to +100). The saturation value change is a bit higher than usual because we are looking for a clean white finish.

As we can see above, we don’t always need complex adjustments to achieve the desired effect. Even when we use presets, it’s great to observe and understand the changes behind each one, to train our perception and approach to each challenge.

Let’s move on and enhance the irises!

First, we create a new mask inside our photo’s Person. Just click on the + icon on top of the Masks panel.

Next, we check the Iris and Pupil option. The usual color shading will preview the mask over the photo. Click on Create to move on to the next step.

Once again, with our mask selected, in this case “Mask 2” (you should always rename each mask to make your work easier), move your mouse to the Preset dropdown menu, and choose Enhance Eyes.

The same two settings were adjusted for this effect. Exposure was pushed up with an editing step value of +0,40 and Saturation was increased to +40. The saturation value change is a bit higher than usual because we are looking for a vibrant color finish.

The difference between original and retouched images is now quite visible, don’t you agree? The whites are now purer and more intense and the irises are much more appealing. All of this with small Exposure and Saturation adjustments. Can you imagine Lightroom’s full potential, now?

Timeout #1

Check this article to find some cool tips and techniques on how to set up and shoot portraits in modern photography.

How to Manually Adjust Masking Settings in Lightroom?

Smile if you love smiling! Let’s retouch this beautiful smile and give this lady’s teeth a subtle sparkle of light!

Let’s begin with a recap of what we’ve learned so far. To open the Masking tool, we hit that awesome M shortcut key. Lightroom will read our photograph to identify a subject and isolate it from the background!

Inside our photo’s Person 1 avatar, we check the Teeth option and click on Create. Next, with the mask selected, we pick Whiten Teeth from the Preset dropdown menu.

We already know that Whiten Teeth adjusts Exposure and Saturation. Let’s try to fine tune our retouching process, playing with two more options. Remember, we have to keep our changes subtle and natural!

For this exercise, we can achieve a cool effect using the following adjustments:

Exposure: +0,40. A bit brighter, not too much, to bring up the teeth from the background.

Saturation: -0.30. I needed some desaturating but raised to less than the Whiten Teeth preset value. If the teeth look too white, the image will feel manipulated – and we never want that!

Texture: -20. Lowering texture values hides some imperfections on the left side teeth.

Dehaze: -40. Dehaze subtly reveals some of the teeth that got lost in a deep shadow on the right side of her mouth.

Timeout #2

Photography is a passion. Live it and share it! From beginners to experienced photographers, get inspired and enjoy testimonies from experienced photographers on how to get creative - and efficient - in portrait photography.

To wrap things up, let’s compare the original and masked images and make sure our retouching work looks natural and interesting.

Awesome! Retouching is fun and exciting, even if many times it is also a work of patience and precision. From my point of view, it’s the search for that perfect balance that makes this work so incredible! Hope you had fun!

What 's Next?

Go further with Lightroom by joining BYOL. As a BYOL member, you will gain access to my Lightroom Essentials course as well as my 30+ additional courses on After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

See you in class! – Dan