White is not the target
Natural teeth contain warm colour, edge shadow and separate planes. This layer moves brighter, low-saturation pixels partway toward neutral and lifts their luminance while resisting red lips and the dark interior of the mouth. The aim is to remove a cast, not turn the teeth into one flat white shape.
It moves colour, and the panel says so where the control is — one of three tools on this site that do, with the Colour brush and Clone. Taking a yellow cast off a tooth is a chroma operation by definition; the luminance-only rule the skin layers keep would describe a different operation under the same name. Everything else about it is the same instrument: the marks are stored in normalised units, the pass runs in the worker, and the export replays the identical operation stack against every pixel of the original.
A safe starting point
- Amount
- 35–50%
- Marks
- Inside the enamel, away from gums
- Region
- On the face, so the layer is bounded
- Check
- Hold the compare control before saving
Limits
- The gate reduces spill; it cannot know the anatomical boundary. Keep the marks inside the teeth.
- The working region bounds this layer, but the skin gate does not apply to it — a tooth is not skin, and gating it against skin would mean it never ran at all.
- Grey or translucent dental work may respond differently from surrounding enamel.
- A high amount removes the colour cues that separate individual teeth and quickly looks artificial.
Continue in the portrait room
- Brighten eyesA small luminance-only brush for iris and eye whites, with colour retained.
- Face editorEvery layer for one face in one panel, with the values beside them. Nothing reshapes a face.
- How far is too farWhere the caps sit, why they are there, and what the distance readout is measuring.
- Why nothing here reshapes a faceThe one exclusion that is a decision rather than a boundary, and the reasoning behind it.
