Written By Steve Patterson

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going learn how to add reflections, or at least, different reflections, to sunglasses.

This is a popular Photoshop effect and opens up a world of creative and artistic possibilities depending on who is wearing the sunglasses and who or what you have them looking at.

Here's the image I'll be using for this Photoshop tutorial:

If we look closely, we can see that there already is a faint reflection in her sunglasses, and it looks like she's standing on the side of a road if I'm not mistaken. To me, she could just as easily be standing on a tropical beach, so we're going to give her more mirror-like reflective lenses and have her looking towards the water instead by using this photo:

as the reflection in her sunglasses:

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Let's get started.

Step 1: Select One Of The Lenses

We need to work on one lens at a time, so let's begin with the lens on the left (our left, her right). To complete the work on the other lens, all we'll need to do is repeat the same steps we're about to do. First, we need to select the lens, so select around the outside of it using the selection tool of your choice (Lasso Tool, Pen Tool, etc.):

Step 2: Create A New Blank Layer

With the lens selected, click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to add a new blank layer above the original Background layer, which is the layer that contains our original image:

Photoshop adds a new layer above the Background layer and automatically names it "Layer 1". Double-click directly on the layer's name in the Layers palette and rename it to "left lens" to make it easier for us to keep track of what we're doing (it's always a good idea to name your layers):

Step 3: Fill The Selection With Black On The New Layer

With the "left lens" layer selected (the currently selected layer is highlighted in blue in the Layers palette), press the letter D on your keyboard to reset your Foreground and Background colors if necessary so black becomes your Foreground color (white becomes your Background color), then use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Backspace (Win) / Option+Delete (Mac) to fill the selection we made with black:

Press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) when you're done to deselect the selection.

It looks like we've filled the left lens with black, but since we're using layers and we've filled the selection on a layer above the Background layer, our original image isn't affected at all. The black filled selection area and the original photo are completely separate from each other.