Adding a Reflection to an Eye and Changing Focus

This will be a really quick tutorial just showing you some basic techniques on how to add a reflection easily to an eye and also shifting focus to one eye or the other.

First download this image or find one of your own:

Also download this or find one as well:

Next fit your ocean image above the picture of the eyes.

Now change the blending mode to soft light

Once you do that size it down a bit more and decide which part of the image you want to reflect in each eye

Next I will grab a 45px soft eraser brush and erase all the parts of the image except what is in the eyes

For the next few steps I need seperate layers for the reflections in the eyes so I will cut out one of them and paste it back in the document.

Next I will drop the opacity on each eye reflection to about 67% so the effect is a little more subtle.

Next I will put all the focus on the right eye by using the lens blur filter.

So I will duplicate my main layer

Now go to filter>>blur>>lens blur

Use these settings:

Now my image looks like this:

I will go ahead and use the same blur on the left eye reflection by using the keyboard shorcut ctrl+f to re-use it.

Now I will add a layer mask to the blurry layer by either clicking the layer mask icon at the bottom of my layer palette or by going to layer>>layer mask>>reveal all

Once that is done I will grab a soft brush around 100px in size and paint away the part of the image I don’t want blurry. Make sure your foreground and background colors are set to default black and white.

You can do half the image or whatever part you want.. the beauty of the mask is that if you mess up just hit “x” on your keyboard to make your foreground color white which will allow you to paint back the part you messed up.

Now this tutorial is done!

Topics: Design, Photoshop, Reflection