Make a Cat-eye lens Tutorial

Intro:

Make a Cat-eye lens of a normal human eye close-up. This technique can be applied to your photos or photos used for magazin covers, can be used for a lot of things really.

Step 1:

First step is to get rid of the black pupil, which we're going to do with the Clone stamp tool. This is my favorite tool ever to do modification on pictures, like removing the iris, or unecessary parts (like the white dots at the top right of the iris. The below picture is zoomed in on 300%, and shows the white dots which we're going to remove after we've done the pupil.



So let's select our Clone stamp tool , and take a brush size of 20px. A nice tip is to change your brush size with the [ and ] keys, [ is for lowering your brush size and ] for increasing. Then zoom in on the picture, I zoomed in twice (300% zoom). Then place your clone stamp tool under the pupil in the blue/green iris, hold the ALT key and left click with the mouse.

My clone stamp location:


This makes a clone of the part you hover and alt+click (depends on the width of the brush size of course). so now we can brush in the iris, but be aware of when you cloned a black part or any other part that might show up that doesn't belong. The thing you have to do then is to go a step back and make a new clone part. Also do NOT brush over the white lightning on the iris. And the last note is also very important, try not to brush strokes but instead just single click overy the pupil, this gives a much nicer end result. If you did all that right you should have something like this below, if not please let me know and I'll help you out.

Step 2:

Now that was a lot of reading for just a simple tool, but I wanted it to be as good explained as possible so you will master the clone stamp tool! Now with the same tool we're going to remove the white dots I talked about earlier. Decrease your clone stamp tool brush size to about 4px and single click brush the white parts.

Step 3:

Now it's time to make the cat eye pupil, make a pen-tool shape like below.



Then rasterize the pen-tool shape by right clicking it in the layers palette and choosing: Rasterize layer. Duplicate the layer also by right clicking but then choose duplicate layer (doh!). Flip the layer horizontally, Edit > Transform > Flip horizontal. Now join the 2 layers together so you get a nice shape without any white spaces.



I think mine (and maybe yours too) is a little to wide, so Press Ctrl+T to go into transform mode, and narrow the width a bit.



Give it a wave filter to make it a little more unique, do this by going to Filter > Distort > Wave. Then use the following settings:



Move the layer to the middle since the wave filter will distort the shape and the position a long with it. And change the opacity to 68%.

Step 4:

Duplicate the cat eye pupil layer and move the duplicated layer under the original cat eye pupil layer. Then apply a motion blur to the duplicated layer, Filter > Blur > Radial blur, with these settings. Amount: 100, Blur method: Zoom, Quality: Best. Change the opacity 30% and the layer blend mode to Overlay.