Research and Planning: Planning Poster

Today I have been playing around with Photoshop with, in my opinion, the best photograph of Brendons' eye for my poster.

I have played around with the colour variations, adding more blues and greens to tone down the overall appearance, as if the eye is too colourful, it will drown out the photographs of me, Anika and Becky in the middle.
I have also messed with the 'skew,' 'perspective' and 'scale' tools to try and make the eye more bulbous. This worked slightly, but there is no major noticeable changes in the appearance of the eye. I researched into making 2D objects more 3D online, but unfortunately the majority of descriptions are for the extended version of Photoshop, which is unavailable to me.
As you can see towards the bottom of the eye, I tried different tools such as the 'eraser' tool and 'paint' tool, varying the opacity with both, but it wasn't completely successful.
I also tried the gradient line tool to try and fade the eye into the background, but it just made the entire image black.
I will have to keep playing around with edit tools and filters in order to achieve the effects that I'm aiming for.
Also, I can't add the photographs of the characters to import into the eye as they have not been taken yet, unfortunately, as Becky is in and out of hospital and I need a photograph of all of us togther, it is proving difficult to arrange a time to take these photographs.