Gavh said 5 years ago 10/6/2006 4:50:13 AM EDT

The rest of this tutorial is basically about copy & paste and making things look right. We start with the eye

We need to make any leftover part of the leopard look synthetic i.e. plastic, metal or rubber. I chose to make the eye and nose look like glossy plastic, well black plastic to be exact ; )

(1) To do this, mask an area around the eye (dont worry about being precise). Then select the background from the layers palette and click Image/Adjustments/Desaturate. Now it needs to look deeper and shinier so click Image/Adjustments/Levels. Move the slider arrow on the left towards the right hand side to almost half way and click Ok. (2) Click Select/Deselect and repeat the process for the nose. Things might become a bit jagged when you do this step, so if u like you can use the smudge tool to smooth things out



(3) Now of the optics. I found a nice picture of a camera lens which worked perfect for the leopards eye. Mask out the lens and then copy and paste it to the leopard picture (make sure when you past it that it is the topmost layer in the layer palette). Now you need to scale it down and make it fit over the original eye. Select the lens layer and click on one of the edge squares that appear. Now right click the layer and select distort. Distort it until it looks right and then hit your Enter/Return button. Make sure it is positioned in the right place and then you can move the layer below the carbon fiber layer. One nit pick: I masked out the bottom left reflection on the lens and made it darker because I just didnt look right, a personal preference. (4) To make the red LED effect in the eye I select the brush tool with a soft-edge nib and the color red and make a dot in the center of the eye, simple yet very effective!



Lastly I double click the carbon fiber layer ( in the layers palette) to bring up its blending properties and select Bevel & Emboss. Play around with these setting till the lighting on the exoskeleton looks right. I prefer to deselect the use global light option because it will mess around all your layers blending settings. Now for the whiskers (lol).