Digital Dental Photography

Digital Photography and Workflow for Dentists

Photography Software

DDS GP: The iPad “Killer App” for Dentists

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Do you have an iPad?  If not, WHY NOT!?!?!?  😀

We got our iPad right after it came out in 2010, and I must say, it has essentially replaced my laptop for any time I need a computer but am not sitting at my desk.  There’s a darn good reason Oprah named it one of her Ultimate Favorite Things.

But for dentists, IMO, there is now a completely different reason for the iPad to become one of YOUR ultimate favorite things, and that is one particular app:  DDS GP.

Use Your Own Photos to Educate Your Dental Patients

One of the best features of this app, is the ability to add your own patient photos to individual presentations.  All you have to do is create a folder of pictures to sync to the iPad, and from within the app, select the photos to add to each presentation, with no limit.  So add Before/After Portraits — composites, amalgams, CERECs, and more!  Then put the iPad in your patients’ hands and simply WOW them!

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Customizable, Portable, & Easy-to-Learn for Dentists and Dental Teams

The DDS GP app currently has more than 200 different presentations, and more are being added regularly.  They include such procedures and diagnoses as:

  • Bleaching: In Office
  • Bone Graft with Extraction
  • Bridge: Porcelain, Anterior
  • Crown-Lengthening
  • Brushing: Bass Technique
  • Cracked Tooth, Cusp
  • Crown: CEREC
  • Invisalign
  • Nightguard: NTI
  • Veneer, Single: Porcelain, Lab

Affordable Dental Case Presentation Software vs. CASEY or GURU

Unlike Patterson Dental’s CASEY (which can run up to $8000) or Henry-Schein’s GURU (not sure, but I have heard about $2000?), DDS GP is truly affordable — only $399! No, I am not kidding, AND that includes free lifetime updates! No, I am not kidding about that, either.

Email Treatment Plans, Add Fees, Include the Presentations, & More

From directly within the app, you can create treatment plans and add presentations from the app, then send it right to your patient via email, or if you have a compatible printer, print it directly from your iPad.  This makes it easy for husbands or wives to show their spouses the same, easy-to-understand presentations that helped them make the decision to move forward on treatment.

Wacom Tablets Make Photo Editing Easy

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Use a Wacom tablet to draw on photos for patient and lab communication.Have you ever tried hand-writing anything on a photo using a mouse?  Or using the mouse to make a selection in Photoshop/Photoshop Elements?  If so, you know just how frustrating and difficult it can be.  Your wrist probably also knows how strenuous it can be.  A few years ago, I was doing so much photo editing and typing, even with an ergonomic keyboard, that my wrists were starting to hurt, and at 2 points I had to wear a wrist-guard for support.  Needless to say, putting on latex gloves over one of those things didn’t work too well!

And that’s why I highly recommend you get a Wacom graphics tablet.  By using a natural hand-writing motion, you can paint, select, write, draw, etc. far more accurately and comfortably.


Wacom Intuos4 Graphics Tablets are Ideal for Dentists

I love using my tablet particularly for cosmetic corrections on big cases, as demonstrated here.  This is a CEREC smile makeover case, 10 units of Empress MultiCAD shade BL3.  To be completely frank, this was my first 10-unit CEREC case, and while I felt pretty good about how it came out, it wasn’t quite good enough to bond in.

So I took some photos, put this one in Photoshop, and started drawing out the corrections I want to make.  I’ll send this to the patient to see if she agrees with me, then I’ll sit down in the lab to correct as needed (will have to redesign/remill a few of them) with this in front as a guide.


Here’s another case from a few years ago – using a Wacom pen/tablet, I can mark up photos as much as I want by using separate layers.  Send pictures like this to your lab in preparation for your diagnostic waxup, and it’s a lot easier for them to know what your thought process is and where you’re going with the case.  (Just so you know, this was one of about 4-5 pictures sent, not the only one, in case you were worried.)


After all……..how many have ever had a lab tell them they sent “too much” info for a big case?  😆

2011 and LOTS of New Info Coming!

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Happy New Year!  😀

I just want to say that I am very excited about this coming year and what will be added here for your use.  Since I will be lecturing on an effective digital photography workflow for dentists, that will be the primary focus for the next 4 months.  As a person with ADD, blogging is a great way of helping me refine my thought processes and the workflow itself as I put them into a format that should be easily usable for you, my colleagues.

Here’s a little of what you can expect:

  1. Video tutorials
  2. Portrait photography tips and settings
  3. How to use your photos in Social Media
  4. Creating website galleries and building online photo galleries
  5. Creating MP4 videos for your office and websites

While there is such a huge wealth of information to present, my goal is to make this stuff EASY for you, so you don’t have to go through the same learning curve I did.  😉

Saving Your Patient Photos

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When it comes to saving all your patient photos, if you are not doing it through your Practice Management Software (PMS), you need a structured format to make it easy to save future photos and to be able to find past ones.  The folder format that I use within Lightroom is one I learned from my Dad, who is a highly organized businessman, with just a few tweaks.

Within the “My Pictures” folder, here is the folder structure I’ve been using for the last 4+ years:

Looking at my folders then, this is how the “big picture” is structured:

An illustration of the folder structure for dental patient pictures

Going deeper within a patient’s folder, it will look something like this:

In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss the importance of keyword tagging your photos, and how to create a keyword heirarchy within Lightroom for easy searchability.

2 Extremely Useful Websites for Learning Digital Photography and Editing Software

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Along the lines of my last post on recommended software for dentists to use for managing, cataloging, and editing their pictures, there are a couple websites that I have found extremely useful and well-done, because they both have enormous selections of online video tutorials:

Lynda.com 

KelbyTraining.com

Figured I ought to mention both of those.  🙂  Each does have a very reasonable subscription fee, whether you choose to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription.

Smile Imaging – What Software and How to Manage Expectations

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Here’s a question I received from a colleague by email recently, and it’s such a good one, it’s the perfect opening for a blog entry.  Thanks to Rich M. for asking (and I do welcome questions and comments, so please……leave a comment or send a question by email.).

Q: “One question on my list is whether you use imaging software in your presentations so patients can view current and proposed/expected outcomes.  I’ve been warned this could be a tricky area to get into due to a gap in patient expectations and actual outcome.  What do you say and what software for this purpose do you use (if you do use any)?”

A:  What we have here is really 2 questions; the first is about software and a “How-To-Do……?” and the second is about patient expectations if you do a computerized smile mock-up to show them what you think the outcome will be.  Let’s start with the software question first, because it’s actually the easier question to answer, although the technical aspect of making it happen is a bit trickier.

Software: If you want to make this process really easy on yourself, there are several pretty good services available that will do the smile imaging for you; while I don’t personally use them nowadays, I have used them in the past and gotten very good service:

This next service I have not used personally, but they are recommended by the DaVinci Lab, Dr. Woody Oaks, and others, so I figure they can do a good job, too.

This next service is actually a relatively easy one to implement in your office; naturally, there is a learning curve, but they offer pretty good support to get you up and running.  If I were doing more cosmetic cases these days myself, I’d probably go back to using this one, but I’m having more fun doing a ton of 6MonthSmiles Adult Ortho and Laser Periodontal Therapy cases.

All these services have a very simplified set-up that you can implement very easily; the absolute easiest are the first 3, because all you have to do is take the pictures and email them; you usually get the completed Before/After Cosmetic Imaging back within 24-48 hours.  They offer a “Rush” option as well.

Here’s another significant benefit to working with both SmileArt and SmileVision:  they are both part of full-service dental labs with a focus on esthetic dentistry.  Therefore, they can help not only do the Before/After Imaging, they can actually provide the crowns/veneers/bridges/etc. to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

That said, what software do I personally use nowadays?  Well, if anything, I use Adobe Photoshop CS4.  This is a program I use almost daily as a photographer, so it’s what I’m most comfortable with, and I know how to do the things that most patients want to see imaged.  However…….for most dentists, unless you’re really serious about this, I do NOT recommend you go this route, because it has a VERY steep learning curve.  It also does require the most time.

Since this post has already gotten a bit long, I’ll answer Part 2 of Rich’s question, about managing patient expectations, in my next posting.