Make an Eyeball

1. Open up a new document (500 x 500 pixels will do) and place a couple of guides so that they cross in the center (this will help your selections snap to the center).

2. Use the eliptical marquee to select a large circle in the center of your document.(hold down shift while you make the circle as this will keep it perfect)

3. Fill the selection with an off white colour.

4. Make a new layer above this and select a smaller circle for the iris. Fill this selection with blue or a colour of your choice. (this can be changed to another colour later if desired)

5. Repeat as above (4.) making a smaller circle for the pupil, fill this with black. This gives you the basic's for the eyeball.

6. Turn off the top layer so you can see what you are doing better during the next stage. Select the iris layer in the layers pallet and load it by holding down Ctrl and clicking on the thumbnail on the layers pallet.

7. Next apply noise to the pupil, filter>noise>add noise, use the settings shown.

8. Next we need to shape the texture for the iris. For this we will use the smudge tool which is found in the toolbar.

Use a brush size of around 40 pixels and make strokes from the centre outwards (make sure the iris is still selected or you will see the smudge marks comming outside the sharp edge of the iris).

Keep going round until the whole iris has been streaked in this fashion.

9. Next to add a bit of shape to the white part. Select the bottom layer and add a bit of inner glow. To do this click on the little "f" symbol at the bottom of the layers pallet and select inner glow.

Enter these settings.

Follow the above steps to add some inner glow to the iris layer.

10. Next make two more layers for the catchlights.

On the first layer make the first catchlight using a small, round, hard edged brush as shown in the picture above. On the second empty layer make another catchlight half way across the iris at about 2 o'clock. Blend this second catchlight using the overlay option on the layers pallet and reduce the opacity a bit. (see above pic)

And that, as they say is basically it. You can mess around with the settings a bit to get different results.

The colour of the iris can be changed by selecting the iris layer and using hue and saturation.

Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation (or Ctrl + U).

Make sure the colorize button is checked, then move the sliders around to taste.

There are of course other ways to do this but I find this is one of the quickest and least complicated.

 

This was the method I used to make the eye in the above picture.