Eye In Hand Project This project is going to entail placing the eyeball you made in your last project in the middle of your hand. The goal is to make it look like it s popping out of the skin and to make it look as real as possible. To do this, we are first going to need a picture of your hand. When you take the picture of your hand, have an idea of how you would like the finished project to look and work towards that goal. Position your hand so as to leave plenty of room for the eyeball popping out of its center. I positioned my hand like the one you see below, but you can position yours differently (no inappropriate gestures). As usual, I adjusted the Levels, or Brightness and Contrast to make the picture look clearer, less washed out, etc. The next step is to create a new document. You should know by now that we like to print things out on our desktop printer, so let s once again create an 8 by 10 document. Set the resolution to 150 pixels per inch. Then we ll need to select the hand in the hand picture using whatever methods you feel comfortable with, as long as you make a good clean selection. I made a rough selection using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, drug the rough selection into the new EyeInHand document I created, and then cleaned up the selection. Once again, clean up the hand using whatever methods you prefer, as long as it looks good. I prefer using a Layer Mask to get rid of unwanted areas, and then applying the mask. Though the edges of my hand looked decent, I wasn t willing to settle for mediocrity, so I softened them up a bit. To do this I command-clicked the hand layer to select just the hand. I chose Select > Modify > Contract and typed in 2 to shrink the selection by two pixels. I then chose Select > Feather and typed in 2 to feather the selection by 2 pixels. Next I inverted the selection (Select > Inverse) to select the area outside the hand. To soften the selection (edges of the hand) I chose Filter > Gaussian Blur and typed in radius of 4. If you choose this method, you could adjust the slider to your liking. Another method to soften the edges of your selection would be to manually paint the edges of your hand with the Blur tool, but I find this method to be a bit quicker and one should get used to doing if your going to be a serious Photoshop user. Look at the before and after pictures of the two thumbs to see what a difference this method makes.
Next you ll create the area in the palm of the hand where it looks like the eye is popping out of the hand, and the skin from the hand is peeling back so as to reveal the eyeball. To do this I ripped a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 copy paper in half, peeled back a circular area in the center of it, and took a picture of it. As usual, adjust the Levels or Brightness and Contrast. I then made a rough selection with the Lasso tool, dragged it into the EyeInHand project, and positioned it and resized it to my liking. After you have done this, you should have two layers. Rename the layers so that the hand layer is named hand and the paper layer is named paper. Next, erase all the unwanted areas of the paper with a soft edge brush. With the paper layer selected, select the lock transparent pixels box. An icon of a lock should now appear in the paper layer With the eyedropper, sample a color of skin from the hand. Select the paintbrush tool, a soft edge brush and paint the white areas of the paper. Make sure color mode is selected to maintain the lights and shadows with the paper. Then deselect the lock transparent pixels box in the Layer palette. Create a new layer, rename it eyehole, and link it to the paper layer. Then zoom in on the eyehole area in the hand, select the area with the polygonal lasso tool, and fill the area with black
Open the Bloodshot Eye document you created for your last project, choose Layer > Merge Visible, then drag the merged eye into the EyeInHand document. Close the Bloodshot Eye project, and DO NOT SAVE THE CHANGES!! Dragging the eye into the hand document will have created a new layer with the eye in it. Rename this layer eye. Deselect the eyehole area if you haven t already done so, and move and resize the eye so that it barely covers the eyehole area that you filled with black. It should look similar to the zoomed in version (below left). Make sure the eye layer is selected, and choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask. Notice how the eye drops into the hole in the hand so that it looks similar to the picture in the middle below. For fun take the move to and move the eye around within the hole. Position it to your liking. Your palette should now look like that below right. Notice the little arrow pointing down in the eye layer. This lets you know eye layer is clipped or masked by the eyehole layer. Only those areas of the eye that fall in the area of the painted pixels of the eyehole layer appear. Cool, huh? For a touch of reality I added a little eye shadow, that is, shadow to the eye using one of my favorite tools, the burn tool. I used a soft edge brush, size 40, with an exposure of 24, highlights for the range, and slowly built up the shadows, getting darker as the eye move back in towards the hand. The last step will be to add a personalized background. To do this, create a new layer, or layers, and move them to the bottom of the layers palette. You will be expected to have all the layers as indicated in the picture above with your background layers for your grade. I personalized my background with a wild cloud pattern and lightning shooting out of the finger. I had planned this all along, which is why I left room enough at the top of the document for the lightning. I also placed faces from other projects into the background and used different blending modes in the layers palette to make them melt into the background. Look at the finished project on the next page. Also look at the Cyclops example, and EyeInMouth example on the very last page of this document. If you finish early you can create similar projects for extra credit.