The Photoshop Smile Design Technique

Esthetic or cosmetic dentistry has become one of the main areas of dental practice emphasis and growth for the past several decades. Many articles have been written and courses taught over the years on concepts of smile design to develop a treatment plan for an esthetic outcome for the patient. The beauty of digital smile design is that patients can see the potential esthetic outcomes of treatment options in minutes. While other dental processes would still need to be completed (ie, generating casts, testing vertical changes and esthetics with a mock-up, etc), using smile design software to visualize the end result is a way to get acceptance by the patient prior to starting the physical processes. This article will show how the authors use Adobe® Photoshop® to edit pre-treatment images of a patient to create digitally enhanced or altered smiles, which could help the dental professional with analysis and treatment planning. It will also help them articulate and present the smile analysis options to the patient.