First of all I want to just say there’s nothing wrong with having braces shown in a photo, however ive had a huge amount of requests asking for me to show how to remove braces from a photo, so im giving you exactly what you want.

So here goes…

1.  Select your image, my image came free thanks to sxc.hu  the exact link to the image can be seen below.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1159549

As you can see I’ve resized the original image, however this is just to fit the website, you don’t have to.  I won’t talk you through how to add an image into Photoshop because if you don’t know how to do this then you should try learning more about the program first.  Anyway lets carry on.

2.  Now that you image is loaded you will want to duplicate it, the reason why we do this is so that if we mess up we will always have the original file.  To duplicate your image hold down CTRL and J. You should now see the duplicated layer in the layers palette.  This will probably be called (layer 1 copy).

Click on layer 1 copy to make it the active layer, only click it once.  This will make sure all the work we now carry out will be done on this layer.

3.  Now that the boring part is out of the way let’s begin getting rid of the braces.  Firstly press Z to select the zoom tool, or you can go to the tool box and click on the magnifying glass, either way is fine.  Next zoom all the way in so you can only see the teeth, take a look below to see what I mean.

4.  Now that you can see all of the teeth we will need a tool that will allow us to get rid of the braces.  There are many ways of doing the next part but I think the clone stamp tool is the easiest.  The clone stamp tool can be found in the tool box it looks like a stamp, you can also access it by pressing S.

Once you have the clone stamp selected, go up to the tool bar and click on the little arrow that’s between the words mode and brush, the arrow can be found in the image below.

Once you click on the arrow please input these settings, however if you used a different image size from mine then you may want to make the brush size bigger or smaller.

5.  it’s important you know how this tool works.  The clone stamp tool allows the user to select a portion of the image and then allows them to put that selection over another part of the image, so in order to get rid of the braces we need to select an area of each tooth that suits the color of the tooth.  Sounds complicated but it really isn’t. To make a selection hold in the alt button and left click on a suitable area of the tooth, this can be seen in the image below.

6.  Now that we have made the clean selection of tooth we simply left click over the part that we want to replace.  Sometimes the computer messes this up and it will take a bit of practice however eventually you will get it, once you have done the first tooth you should have something that looks like this:

It’s important that you make a clean selection otherwise the tooth will look messed up, also you may want to take many selections on each tooth to make the image look more realistic.  Also when you go on to a new tooth you should take a new selection each and every time using the ALT and left click method.

Carry on the method until the braces are removed, this is tricky and you won’t get it the first time, however if you do be sure to let me know.  You now should have something that looks like this:

As you can see from above even I can get it wrong and the whole image has a rather fake look to it as the teeth aren’t realistic looking at all, however I just wanted you to see the basic process and not for you to get too frustrated by being unable to do it, after all I get paid to do image editing and even I mess up from time to time.

When your happy with the image you should have successfully have removed the braces, heres what I come up with:

Although my final image isn’t great you can see how this tutorial works.  Please check back as the next tutorial will be on how to whiten teeth.  Also if you have tried this tutorial please send your images into us at cameracity@hotmail.co.uk