Chrome and a Gyro

A chrome effect was worked into this image although it has been coloured as well. I wanted to photograph the gyroscope outside rather than under studio lights against a fake sky background.

There was always going to be some movement in the object and making a successful cut-out would have been very tricky.

Also I am a big advocate of doing as much as possible for real in the camera rather than hacking it together later. 

• I had to wait a while to get a clear blue sky.
  
  The gyroscope, spinning at full speed, was balanced on a finger, even though it was slowing down for this picture.

• The sky was nicely blue at the top but had gone to a hazy off-white lower down. A new layer was filled with the same blue at the top and a lighter blue at the bottom.
  
  Setting the layer to Darken mode made the lower portion of the image blue rather than off-white.
• The blue layer also coloured the gyro. Using a mask, the gyro was protected from the blue. As the blue layer and the sky were the same colour and there was some blur on the gyro, this was easily done with a soft black brush.
  
  

• The finger was not in the right position and I intended to make the hand smaller anyway, so a separate hand was photographed with the same lighting.
• The old finger was patched over with plain sky.

• The hand was cut out with the Pen tool, then resized.
• There is a chrome filter in Photoshop but a better way can be found in the Photoshop In A Day manual.
  
  After the effect has been applied to the hand, it was coloured mauve with Hue & Saturation to match the colour on the gyro.
• Being metal, the lower stem of the gyro was reflecting skin colour from the original finger. This colour was desaturated and replaced with a little mauve.
  
  

• Finally, to make the sky look like a real sky and not a studio background, a cloud was added from my sky collection.
  
  A quick change of Mode removes the blue around the cloud so that it merges into the blue of the picture.

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