Keep 'em Where I can See 'em.

First I needed a picture of handcuffs. I happened to have a set left over from a prior life, so I put them on and had my son take several pictures from different angles. Redundancy was the key here. Maybe one in ten was viable, due to various factors, the most prevalent being the difficulty in photographing a shiny surface and keeping well defined edges.

We finally settled on a black gig bag as a backdrop.

I cut the cuffs out of the stock photo using the lasso tool. The magnetic lasso (a good friend of mine) kept wandering off on it's own. Once they were cut out, I moved them to the workpiece and erased as much detritus as possible.

Since I had a fair idea of where this picture was going, I went ahead and made a blue companion for the red light. I just duplicated the red one and used hue and saturation adjustments to change it to blue. Notice the increasing number of layers. I love layers. Apparently, I had already cut out the hands, which I forgot to mention in step two.

As soon as I made the blue light, I immediately spent too much time trying to perfect it and blend the overlap with the red one. I should have left that for later, as I eventually covered most of it.

At this point, I also moved, resized, and altered the color of the cuffs. Again, the color alteration was premature. In the end, the red reflection was unwanted.

Next, I needed a body to go with the hands. I stood in front of the source photo and estimated the position of those hands if held in front of a body. I then had my daughter take a picture of that portion of my body. Since I hadn't changed my duds after work, I already wore suitable atire for the theme. That made it easier in the editing process.

A strongly contrasting backdrop also makes editing easier. In this case, an oak door served the purpose well.

I tried to hold my hands just so, to make the shirt match up with the intended finished product.

Now the fun began. I linked the two source hands and the cuffs together and flipped the whole works over. Then, I cut the body from the stock photo using the magnetic lasso, and copied it to the work piece. Having my hands in the shot helped me resize the body. I merely enlarged it until my hands approximated the size of the source hands. When this was accomplished, I hid the source hands, lassoed my own, and cut them out of the picture.

Next, I unlinked the source hands and cuffs, and positioned them at the ends of the shirt sleeves. I erased the arms in places to make them run inside the sleeves, then cloned and smudged the sleeves to get rid of any hard edges. I had to resize the cuffs again once the hands were positioned.

This was an extension of step five, really. It so happened that I saved where I saved, so some of these moves may be a bit out of order...

I cloned the clothing to fill in any gaps made by removing my hands from my body. Then I smudged and blurred things around to get rid of any tell-tales.

The source hands were far too bright for the picture, so I adjusted brightness and contrast to make them work. I also adjusted the body to make everything blend. I added some spotlight filter to simulate the arresting officer's flashlight.

I have found that Photoshop doesn't show things as they will appear in other viewers all the time. So, at this point, I flattened the image, saved it, and looked at it in Windows Picture and fax viewer.

Finally, I did a little brush work to give the lights behind the subject a softer edge.

I didn't like the dark shadow on the subject's right thumb, so I painted some skin color on with a 25% opaque brush an then dodged around there until I was happy.

I fooled around with the shirt tail and the shadows in that area.

A few other light touches and a final crop were all that was left to do.

As a final step, I merged the visible layers, deleted the extra ones, and saved.