How often have you got a great shot spoiled by intrusions into the background?

We shot this cat using a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. It was photographed outdoors in good lighting conditions and the sharpness and the light in the eyes gives the image a certain charm, but we don't really want to see the rest of the garden in the background. Try this different approach for dealing with this problem without having to cut out the background.

Open your layers palette F7 and rename the thumbnail from the default background to anything of your choice. It is always good practice to label your layers, which becomes more important as the layers increase. Drag the thumbnail over the centre icon at the base of the layers palette to make a copy. Turn off the copy by clicking the eye icon and select your basic cat layer.

Select gaussian blur from the filter menu and select a radius of around 35. At this stage you could also consider adding a very subtle texture to this blurred layer. Textures are found via filters>textures>texturizer. (See below)

Change back to your copy layer and add a layer mask. You do this by clicking the bottom left icon in the layers palette and the mask will appear to the right of your image thumbnail. Choose your airbrush with black and spray into the background of your image. Wherever you spray black, the image will be masked allowing the bottom one to show through. You may need a little practice with the pressure settings on your airbrush. Mistakes can easily be put right by spraying white. Carefully spray around your cat revealing to blurred background beneath. You will find that the cat's fur is very forgiving to mistakes and this technique is very effective. (Below)

The one disadvantage of this technique is the whiskers, which are difficult to mask around.

Try this trick.

Create a new blank layer over the other two layers and double click the pencil icon from the tool bar. Enter around 50 into the fade box and choose transparent. These settings will enable you to draw a white line that naturally fades over 50 pixels. On the blank layer draw in some new whiskers. The advantage of the blank layer is that you are not effecting the main image at all. In fact you could use a new blank layer for every whisker.

The final result is a much improved image without the problems of making a selection around the fur.

Final Image