Photoshop Tutorial: Reflective Eye

Developer Newsletter

Photoshop Tutorial: Reflective Eye

By Jon Gos
2008-02-25

Reflective Eye

In this tutorial you'll learn how to simply and quickly add the reflection of a scene to your subjects eyeball. I've also included the actual Photoshop session in with notes so you can see for yourself how this is done.

First, create a Photoshop document and import your main eye image and the image you want reflected.

In this tutorial, the background layer is a high quality close-up of an eye. Our reflection layer in this image is a race car and driver.

Slightly distort the layer for perspective. Edit >> Transform >> Perspective.

Scale the reflection layer so that it's slightly larger than the eye, placing the image so that it covers the Iris and Pupil. You may have some overlap onto the Sclera but don't worry, we'll mask that out soon enough.

Now, we need to create a sphere about the size of the Iris. Don't worry if your circle protrudes over the eyelid.

Create a new layer. On this new layer, fill the sphere selection with a solid color and hide it. (We're just going to use this layer to quickly select our sphere later.)

Option + Click the circle layer and then select the layer with your scaled reflection layer. You should have a sphere shape selected over the eyeball. Spherize (Filter >> Distort >> Spherize) the reflection layer.

Use a setting of 75%. Eyes are spherical but they aren't perfect spheres so we don't want our reflection to look like it's on a ball versus an imperfect eye.