In this first part of the tutorial, we are going to remove the distracting background from the photo to isolate just the baby and her pumpkin-pillow. In the second part we will use the cut out picture to create the front of a baby announcement card.
Photoshop Elements 3.0 offers several selection tools we could use to isolate the object in this photo: The selection brush, magnetic lasso, background eraser, or magic eraser tool. For this image, I found that the magic eraser worked well for quickly taking out the background, but it required some additional edge cleanup after removing the background.
This technique may seem like a lot of steps, but it will show you a very flexible technique to make non-destructive selections in Elements that are very flexible. For those that are familiar with Photoshop, this is a way to simulate something that works just like layer masks.
To begin, save the image above to your computer, then go to the standard edit mode in Photoshop Elements 3 and open the photo. To save the image, right click on it and choose "Save Picture As..." or drag and drop it into Photoshop Elements directly from the Web page.
(Macintosh users, replace Command for Ctrl, and Option for Alt wherever these keystrokes are referred to in the tutorial.)
