Photoshop Skills: Earth & Eye (Day 1)

For our first full session we were required to create an image which replaced the iris of an eye with an image of the Earth, We did this using Adobe Photoshop CS5.X, The files for both the Earth and the eye had been uploaded to "Flickr" prior to the class for us to download and use in photoshop. For this session i was paired with (My now good friend) Kieran due to a lack of systems.
The image of the Earth was about twice as big as the image of the eye, So I used the "Free Transformation" option located under "Image>Free Transformation". We shift clicked the corners to keep the sphericle shape of the earth as we resized it, We then trimmed off the top so that it would not clip with the eye lid/lashes. We then used a layer blending technique to merge the Earth with the iris.
I added a little personal darkening around the edges to give the core a bit more emphasis, and some slight colour tweaking.