Photoshop Quick Tips #12: Alien Eye

On today's quick tips I will be showing you how to create an alien eye, a simple and easy effect that can give an extra coolness to you next manipulation or just freak out one of your friends by getting them and alien eye.

Ok, to begin with we need a photo that we want to apply the Alien Eye. I got a close up eye to make it easier to show you.

Now what we need to do is to paint the whole eye area black, you can do that by selecting the eye area and painting it black or just going with the brush, the important thing is that you get the eye area painted black and make sure you do that on a new layer just in case you need to make any changes later on.

We got the main part done now we need to work around the details on the eye, first detail is to give some light reflections to make the eye look more realistic. So, on a new layer pick a small soft brush I just painted a little mark, a line following the curve of the eye and another two little marks, to decrease the roughness give a little bit of gaussian blur and you should get a result like you can see bellow.

Now we are going to do another line on the bottom part, create a new layer and using a soft brush I'm going to make a thicker line as you can see.

To finish you need to apply a good amount of Gaussian Blur and lower the Opacity of the layer to 50% so that line turns into a nice light reflection that will make your alien eye look even more realistic.

So your Alien Eye is almost done and your layer should look like this:

Now to give a better contrast I am going to create a new layer between the background and blackeye layer and I will paint a big black mark around the eye as you can see.

And to finish up apply a good amount of gaussian blur (I used 60%). This will reduce the contrast between the eye and the skin around it.

The reason why I didn't write the exactly setting on each move is because you need to see and feel how it looks every time you apply something, there is not a perfect recipe so adjust everything the way you like it and you will have a great result.

download the .psd