How to Add a Reflection to Sunglasses in Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to add a realistic looking reflection of a city to a model’s sunglasses using Photoshop.

This tutorial brings together quite a few things including selections and advanced masking. We start by lowering the opacity of the second image (the one used for the reflection) and duplicate a part of it – one for each eye. Next we create a group and put the layer mask on the group – which will make your “reflected images” only visible on the glasses (pretty cool actually).

From now on our goal is to make the reflection look realistic by adding an adjustment layer (levels) and changing the color by adding another adjustment layer (hue and saturation).

Only recently Nace looked at  the other side of what you can do with glasses – i.e. removing reflections and glare off them.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

5 comments

  1. Do you have this as a downloadable document? I’m trying to follow along while doing it on one of my own images, but I just can’t keep up and I’m getting lost! Really, really, really want to do this to create a template that I can use to apply various images as reflections.

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