This was going to be yesterday's shot, but the editing was too much for so late at night, so I went with the goofy one instead and waited until today to do the heavy lifting on this.
When I learned how to change eye color a few days ago, I immediately thought of a color wheel of eyes. Then a friend was giving me advice, focusing on "so what?" An eye color wheel would be cool, but convey nothing.
That's when I had the thought to combine it with the emotion shots various people have taken.
Some emotions, at least in my part of the world, connect to certain colors: sad is blue, angry is red, etc. Others, not so much, but I needed to fill in the three primary and three secondary additive colors (light adds, while pigments subtract).
I learned at least one reason to have the lights above me: to prevent a shadow bar across the middle of my forehead. I had to dodge it on each shot.
I found out that some of my facial expressions were more on target for emotions other than I initially thought when I shot them. For example, what ended up as sadness is what I meant to be fear when I shot it, and the shot I used for fear was going to be surprise.
This took me longer than anything else to edit because I had to touch up and then change the eye color 6 times, and only then start building the composite.
Turns out that setting the layer to color mode and then changing eye color works with my dark eyes only when picking certain "heavier" colors like red and blue. Lighter colors like yellow or cyan don't even show up, so I ended up using screen layer mode.
This was my first time using text layers in years, and I also learned how to intersect selections with existing layer masks to create new shapes.
Incredible processing work!! I liked reading about how you found the expressions fit emotions other than what you'd initially intended. For some reason, that strikes me as telling - we never know for sure if how we appear conveys what we really feel. GREAT idea and very well executed!
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