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Create An Aviator Reflection Effect

posted by John Owen on July 3rd, 2009, in Photo Effects, Photoshop | 5 Comments

You quite often see the reflection of the surroundings on sunglasses; this tutorial will show you how to create just that. You will be adding a reflection to some aviator shades and adding some grungy text on the wall to give a hippie feel to the picture. This effect creates an awesome image and really boosts the quality of the shot, whilst letting the viewer know that it’s in an urban environment.

Before we start here are the resources for the tutorial, there is a .PSD included at the end of the tutorial.

Step 1

Open the ‘Girl with shades’ image, and then put the ‘City Buildings’ photo in it. We now have both photo’s in the same document. First off we need to resize the City image, do this by selecting the the Marquee Tool (M) whilst having the city layer selected and right-clicking on the image and select Free Transform. Once thats done, drag one of the corners while holding shift (to keep the image in proportion) and make it about the size of the shades as so:

Step 2

Press enter or click the save changes box near the center top of the screen. Press the little eye on the city layer to make it invisible, we don’t need it now. At the moment we need to create a selection around the glasses, there are a few ways to do this. Since the shades are quite curvy lets use the Pen Tool (P). If you don’t know how to use the pen tool you can use the Lasso Tools, it won’t be as accurate though. You can learn how to use the pen tool here.

Create a selection around the aviators, select the city layer and press the eye to make it visible again. Next right-click on the selection with the Marquee (B) tool and press Select Inverse. Now press the DEL key.

Step 3

Since the reflection is a bit extreme set the layer opacity to 80-90%, in case you’re wondering I chose 90%. Now select the top layer in you’re document and go to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast. Click ok, now double click on the layer to open up the options. My settings were +2 for brightness and +22 for contrast. Now do the same again but select Curves. Make sure you’re curve looks a little something like mine:

Step 4

That’s the aviator part done, onto the text. Create a new text layer beneath the adjustment layers. Make it a similar color to the wall (I used #8d5526), make sure it’s quite a rough font.Then set the blending options to Color Dodge.

Step 5

Now we need to slightly remove reflection at lower part of the sunglasses.

Click on the reflection layer and click the mask button on the layers window. Grab the eraser tool and slightly rub out the bottom part of the glasses.

Finish!

Any questions, just post a comment! Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/vaughton for tutorial updates!

Download the .PSD!