Editing #4

After discussing how I was going to compose my background, I decided upon the idea of using a graveyard! I placed the background in Photoshop, and applied a gaussian blue at 23.1 pixels. This made the gravestone look like it was taken at the scene, with the hand penetrating the ground, and not an edited version.

I then cleared the arm layer image from the background, meaning that they gravestone came through the image, looking like the hand was taken in front of the gravestone. To achieve this, I used the magnetic lasso tool to draw around the fingers, inverse the selection and then erased from there. This meant that the fingers weren't painted out, and it looked clean and crisp.

I then used the blur tool on 100% tolerance to blur the edges of the fingers, to make them look less fake.  I then decided to move the arm upwards in the image to achieve a tighter crop.

I then realised that the arm looked odd, as the original color of the arm looked warm and bright, not dull and dead like I wanted it to look like. I used the desaturation tool in hue and saturation and took it to -60%. This suited my intentions better than having a bright and warm arm. I then used the colour balance tool, turned the brightness down and levels to make it look more believable.

I used the Levels to make the shadows darker in some places, which worked really well. I then took on the challenge of making the hand look like it had come out of the ground, by applying mud and dirt to the base of the arm. I used a brush copyright free for personal use from a website, (http://myphotoshopbrushes.com/brushes/id/218) called Spetter, Splash and Splatter, which gave me 43 brushes to use. I used 6 or 7 of these brushes to create the textured area at the bottom of my arm.