>>3292580>I’m assuming this means I should have cranked up my flash to brighten the model more?I'm going to be honest, I don't know. I haven't done real life photography (I'm just here to look at cool pictures and to find stuff to practice photo manipulation on). My limited experience is with rendering engines... I'd just put a light near her face within the 3D scene (we get to cheat like that, lol). I assume that would be the same as cranking up the flash, but take this advice with a grain of salt.
>Any ideas on how I could whiten teeth better in the future?This I do know... First you want to up the teeth's value. You'll have to be careful here to not ruin the shadows between the teeth. When you do that you'll notice two colours pop out; brown and pink (stains and gums). You want to mostly desaturate the brown. If the pink stand out to much than brush its value down slightly and desaturated it a touch to smooth the transition to gums. The value of the teeth is what makes it look bright. Only desaturating will make them look grey.
The key here is to retain the shape; adding a highlight helps reinforce the tooth's shape, and it also adds a sparkle. The key with highlights is that they aren't just an increase to value and that they aren't just white. A highlight is reflected light; If your subject is lit with blue light than the reflected highlight will be an blue as well; If the subject is lit by sunlight, than the highlight will be a warm, delicate orange, etc (this isn't true for metals, but teeth aren't metal). Use the eye dropper on the brightest point in the image.
Also highlight on very reflective surfaces are usually sharp; use a brush with only a tiny amount of feathering.
Pic related has an attempt to add definition back into her teeth (been messing around with the image to try out new GIMP features). Its a subtle effect, but when you compare it to the originally posted version, you can see that they really pop out. Hope this helps.
