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Not everyone's blessed with pearly white teeth, especially as we get older and drink more coffee and tea and perhaps smoke, our teeth turn yellow(ish). Bleaching is an option for some, but for most it just isn't important enough... until they see themselves with a big smile on a picture.
This tuturial will show a very quick and effective way of "bleaching" teeth in pictures.
For this tutorial you need an image editor that has the following options:
- hue/saturation adjustment
- layers
- layer masks
Keyboard shortcuts are for Adobe Photoshop (CS3) on Windows. For Mac users: substitute Ctrl with Cmd and Alt with Option.
Once you have the picture open, duplicate the background layer (Ctrl + J, or drag the layer to the New Layer icon -  ). I always do this in case I want to make edits (like removing spots) while staying able to revert back to the original image.
 
Double-click the layer's name to rename it. I'm calling it "new teeth"
Go to, or open, the Layers panel and click the Create new fill or adjustment layer icon at the bottom ( ).
Pick Hue/Saturation... from the fly-out menu.
In the dialog that shows, move the Saturation slider all the way to the right. Ignore the strange color ;)
 
With the mask of the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer selected, press Ctrl + I to invert the mask (it should be all black now, and the image back to normal).
 
Double-click the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer's name to rename it. I've called it "whitening".
Press and hold Alt and move the cursor between the whitening layer and the new teeth layer. This will change the cursor into the Create clipping mask cursor ( ). When it does, left-click once. This moves the top layer to the right and gives an arrow pointing down, and also changes the cursor ( ).
Select the paint brush  from the toolbar and check the brush' settings (mine's set to 95% hardness, round brush, 10px diameter).
Press D on your keyboard to reset the default colors (white foreground, black background). 
Make sure you have the whitening layer's mask selected and paint with white over the teeth.
This will give them a strange color again while leaving the rest of the image unchanged.
 
If the mask's edge (between the white & black) is too harsh, add a faint Gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur) to make the transition a little smoother.
When the mask is done, double-click on the whitening layer's thumbnail (not the mask) to re-open the Hue/Saturation dialog.
Press and hold Alt, then click on the Reset button.
Now decrease the saturation and increase the lightness a bit.
Note: You may have better results by changing the Edit pull-down box's setting from Master to one of the colors (the one that's most prevalent in the non-white teeth).
Once you're done, click the OK button to close the dialog box.
Zoom out to see the entire image. You may have over-done the whitening, making the person look unnatural. To fix this, lower the opacity of the whitening layer. I set mine to 60%
 
One final, very important tip: do not ever tell the person whose teeth you've bleached that you did that unless they asked you to. It's not nice to tell someone "Your teeth were so yellow, I whitened them for you" :)
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