Adding Reflections To Sunglasses In Photoshop
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Step 12: Select The Gradient Tool With A White-To-Transparent Gradient
To finish off our work on the left lens and give it a bit more of a three dimensional, curved appearance, let's add a highlight to it, as if the sun is reflecting off of it. I'm going to add it in the top right corner of the lens. To do that, we need the Gradient Tool, so select it from the Tools palette or press G to select it with the keyboard shortcut:
We want to add a white-to-transparent gradient, so press the letter X on your keyboard to swap your Foreground and Background colors, making white your Foreground color. Then with the Gradient Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document to bring up the Gradient Picker and select the gradient second from the left, top row:
Step 13: Load A Selection Once Again Around The Lens
Hold down your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and click directly on the thumbnail for the "left lens" layer in the Layers palette to once again load a selection around the lens:
Step 14: Add A New Layer At The Top Of The Layers Palette
Make sure the top layer (the "multiply" layer) is currently selected in the Layers palette, then click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to add a new blank layer above all the others. Rename the new layer "highlight":
Step 15: Drag Out A White-To-Transparent Gradient On The "Highlight" Layer
To add the highlight, I'm simply going to drag out a white-to-transparent gradient on the "highlight" layer, starting from the top right corner of the lens and extending downward diagonally towards the center:
Release the mouse button and Photoshop draws the white-to-transparent gradient, adding the highlight to the lens. Since we had a selection around the lens, the gradient is confined to the area inside the lens. Press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to deselect the selection. Here's my image after adding my highlight in the top right corner of the lens:
Step 16: Repeat The Same Steps For The Other Lens
We've completed work on the left lens. Now we just need to add the reflection to the right lens, and to do that, we simply repeat all the steps we've just done for the other lens:
- Select the right lens
- Add a new layer and name it "right lens"
- Fill the selection with black
- Drag the second image into the sunglasses document and rename its layer "right reflection"
- Create a clipping mask to clip the "right reflection" layer to the "right lens" layer below it
- Use Free Transform to resize and reposition the image inside the lens
- Add an "Inner Shadow" layer style to the "right lens" layer
- Apply the "Spherize" filter to the "right reflection" layer
- Duplicate the "right reflection" layer and rename it "multiply"
- Change the blend mode of the duplicate layer to "Multiply"
- Lower the opacity of the new "multiply" layer to brighten the image back up or lower the opacity of the "right reflection" layer to make it even darker.
- Add a highlight in the top right corner of the right lens with the Gradient Tool and a white-to-transparent gradient
Keep in mind as you're repositioning the image in the right lens with the Free Transform command that the reflection in the right lens should be coming from a slightly different angle than the reflection in the left lens, so to make things look more realistic, adjust the position of the right reflection so it appears a bit off center from the left one. Once you've repeated all the steps for the right lens, you're done!
Here, for comparison, is my original image once again with the original reflection in the sunglasses:
And here, after repeating all the steps for the right lens, is my final result. When repeating the steps for the right lens, I only lowered the opacity of the "right reflection" layer to 90% rather than the 80% I lowered the "left reflection" layer to, and the reason for it is that her face seems to be tilted away slightly from the direction of the sun so I made the reflection in the lens closest to the sun appear slightly brighter, again just to add a touch more realism:
And there we have it!
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