I shot this picture below of my cat, but the corner of the room shows just by the cats ear and there is some junk down the bottom spoiling the picture. It is a Maine Coon moggie and has very soft hair that defies my attempts to select just the background.

We don't think you need to worry too much about making your selection that detailed, but first we decided to cover up that offending corner by the cats ear. We made an oblong selection of the background just to the left of that offending corner between the cats ears and feathered the edge of the selection 10 pixels.

The feather command is found under select from the menu bar. Using the copy and paste commands we copied our section of background to a new layer and using the move tool covered that offending corner. Photoshop automatically copies to a new layer for you. This also covered up part of the cat's ear and still left some tell tale signs on the background. We chose the eraser tool with a pressure setting of only 4 and gradually blended the right side of our copied section until there was a soft blend between the background tones.

Increasing the pressure setting we carefully revealed the ear of the cat. When you are completely satisfied with your work select layer - Merge Visible from the menu bar which will join your copied section back into your original. The other areas can be dealt with quickly and effectively with the clone tool including the black area bottom right and in fact the cats fur makes this process very forgiving to small errors.

Looking really critically at the image the background still left something to be desired and we decided that a subtle texture would be a great improvement. Using the magic wand tool we selected the entire background with the setting around 30. Holding the shift key we were able to add to our selection and gradually build it up as shown below.

 

Looking critically at that selection we could still see that it was not picking out every hair of the cat, but the next process would deal with that. We feathered the edge of our selection by 10 pixels before adding the texture to the background, which would mask the remaining imperfections. We chose Texturizer from the filter menu setting the scaling at 200%, the relief at 2 and the light direction top left. When complete even a close look cannot tell that the texture stops at the edge of the cat. It convincingly looks like a textured wall and it was the feathered edge that allowed us to turn what may have been a difficult task into a relatively simple one. We adjusted the levels and colour saturation of Boogie to finish the job.

 

TIP. In the texturizer command you are given the choice of other textures that ship with Photoshop. To find them select Load Texture from the Texturizer palette and then find the textures folder within Photoshop. In Photoshop 5 try following this string. C/:ProgramFiles/Adobe/Photoshop 5.0/Goodies/Textures. Many great textures can be found in this folder, which can be copied to a much more convenient place on your hard drive if you wish.