Learn to Photoshop
How it was done

• The hand was photographed separately against a plain background.
  A professional hand model was required here, in order to have a more perfect specimen of a hand. A normal person's hand won't usually look good enough for such a close-up image.



• The hand and arm were cut out with the Photoshop Extract Tool
  and given a low feathering to soften the edge slightly.




• The building is that of a financial corporation in central London. A typical steel and glass thing banks erect for themselves these days.



• The hand was dragged on to the image of the building and positioned suitably.
• A copy was made of the hand and given some Rotation blur to make the thumb and the hand itself look a bit more active.
• The moving version of the hand was behind the sharp version, which was given an opacity of 80%.



• The background building needed to be flipped horizontally to improve the composition.
• It was made out of focus using Lens Blur. Lens Blur gives a more realistic out-of-focus effect than the traditional Gaussian Blur. The strength of the filter used is purely a matter of opinion but it's worth checking just how much blur would exist in real life by looking through a camera at a similar set-up.













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