HI!

I have taken some pic. of my DD, but the background is so messy/disturbing.
How can I remove elements in a picture in PSE 2?

Thax for your time

I use different techniques depending on what the problem is. First you need to decide whether you want to remove the background completely or just diminish it:

Here's one way to diminish a busy background:
To diminish the effects of the background, make a new layer. Apply a Gaussian blur to it, enough so that the busy background is blurred the way you like it (this will make your foreground fuzzy, but ignore that). Then you can go in with your eraser tool, choose a soft round brush, and erase the main part of your picture you want to be clear and sharp.

If you want to completely remove the background, here's some things you could try:

*Try using the magnetic lasso to draw around the subject you want to keep. (While using this tool, press "backspace" to remove the last locked edge if it goes somewhere you don't want it. You can also manually snap on an edge just by clicking with your mouse) When you have it selected, feather it slightly (maybe 3 to 5 pixels), then click "select inverse" and hit backspace to delete everything but what you've selected.

*If the background is very different in color than your foreground, try using the magic eraser (one of the options when you choose the eraser). It will erase pixels that are similar in color and brightness to the one you select. If you choose "continuous," it will erase only those pixels that are touching the one you click on. If you don't choose continuous, it will remove anything similar in color and brightness to the one you selected. Fooling around with the tolerance setting will give you more or less pixels selected.

You can get a similar effect to this by using the magic wand to select and "backspace" to delete. That way, you can see what is selected.

Hope that helps. There's a lot of other ways to do it, too. Good luck.

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Thank you so much for answering my questions - TFS

You could also turn the bg b&w with a slight blur... this can usually do a lot for a busy bg pic... hth!

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only turn the background black and white? and then blur the background. Can you tell me step by step, please

What I do is make 2 layers... one is the original pic, the second is the b&w pic. (You can also make a third... the b&w pic with a slight gaussian blur... that way if you end up not liking the 'blur' part, you can delete the layer and still have the plain b&w one...)

There are many ways to 'combine' the two. You can erase or mask. (I choose to mask because it's always 'fixable' if you end up not liking it.) You can 'add a layer mask' and paint away the parts you don't want (black paints away, white brings it back) OR you can use quick mask. Press the keyboard shortcut Q choose your brush tool and paint inside the area you want to KEEP. (It should be red) when you've got it all in there, press Q again and you should now have it all selected (marching ants). Add a layer mask to the selection and that should do the trick. If you need more details, I can write up a mini-tut tomorrow and send it to you! Let me know...

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