To celebrate National Sunglasses Day, this is a crash course on how to create mind-blowing reflections in your lenses with double exposures using the PicsArt photo editor. We’ve broken it down into five tips that’ll have your friends banging down your door to get their hands on your magic shades.

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
Original #FreeToEdit image by @tigranmelkonyan1

1. The Easy Way

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
Original #FreeToEdit image by @chuckboo

The easiest way to do this is to use the Add Photo Tool to drop a single landscape-style image across your sunglasses. Lower the opacity slider to make your reflection translucent or change the overlay mode from Normal to a different setting that blends the images automatically, like Screen. Then, tap on the paintbrush icon to erase along the edges of your sunglasses. Presto!

2. Get Precise With the Drawing Tools

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
Original #FreeToEdit image by @mauryargentino

You can also add photos from Draw, then use the eraser. This has a couple of advantages. First of all, you can break up your workspace into different layers, but more importantly, you can use the paintbrush to black out previous reflections. To erase reflections seamlessly, use the Eyedropper Tool in the Color Chooser to mimic the background. Then use a soft brush and paint the background colors over your lens in broad strokes, and erase everything but what’s inside of your frames.

Double Exposure in Glasses Photo Editing
The busy reflection in the lens was cleaned with the drawing tool.

3. Sideways Portraits

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
By @mark-garg

The double exposure illusion is much harder to pull off on a profile shot, because reflections narrow as they turn to the side. The trick here is to squish your reflection horizontally on any lens that is facing sideways. The more your lens faces sideways, the more narrow your reflection should be.

4. Positioning

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
Original #FreeToEdit image by @grig15

Knowing where to position your reflection within your lens isn’t always obvious, especially if you’re reflecting the same image in both lenses. A reflection’s position can vary between the left and right lens, so play around with different positions until you find one that works. From how close the object being reflected is, to whether the glasses being worn are straight or crooked, there are many factors that can affect a reflection’s position.

5. When Worlds Collide

Create Eye-Popping Double Exposures for Sunglasses Day
Original #FreeToEdit image by @tigranmelkonyan1

One of the funnest parts about choosing a reflection is that it doesn’t need to be connected to the environment in your photo. Use your sunglasses to bring drastically different environments face-to-face with each other. Reflect a galaxy within a garden, a desert within a snowscape, or the ocean deep within a mountainscape. Stretch beyond the limits of what’s possible and let your imagination get carried away.

Think you’re starting to get a hold on this whole double exposure thing? Show us your creative ideas and throw something awesome in your sunglasses. Share your creation with #DEsunglasses.