Adding Reflections To Sunglasses In Photoshop

Step 7: Add An "Inner Shadow" Layer Style

Let's add a bit of a shadow to the reflected image so it looks like it's part of the lens and not just sitting on top of it. Click back on the "left lens" layer in the Layers palette to select it, then click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Select Inner Shadow from the list of Layer Styles that appears:

This brings up Photoshop's Layer Style" dialog box set to the Inner Shadow options in the middle column. I want my shadow to appear mainly in the top right corner of the lens so I'm going to set my Angle to 65°. You may want to set yours to a different angle. Set the Distance option to 1 px and lower the Size option down to about 3 px:

Here's my lens after applying the Inner Shadow:

Step 8: Apply The "Spherize" Filter

Right now, the image we're using for our reflection is completely flat, but most lenses have a slight curve to them, so let's add that slight curve to our reflection image. Click on the "left reflection" layer in the Layers palette to select it. Then hold down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and click directly on the thumbnail for the "left lens" layer in the Layers palette:

This will load a selection around the lens back into the document:

We're going to be applying the Spherize filter to the "left reflection" layer, and by loading this selection first, this allows us to apply the filter only to the area inside the selection, rather than applying it to the entire layer.

Now that we've loaded the selection, go up to the Filter option at the top of the screen, choose Distort, and then choose Spherize. When the Spherize filter dialog box appears, select Horizontal Only for the Mode option at the bottom, then use the slider to raise the Amount to around 25-30%. I'm going to raise mine to 30% since her lenses seem to have quite a bit of curve to them:

Click OK when you're done to apply the filter and exit out of the dialog box. Press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) when you're done to deselect the selection. Here's my image after applying the Spherize filter to the image inside the left lens. The difference is subtle, but it's usually the small things that make the difference between something that looks realistic and something that doesn't: