Clear the Clutter

So, here we present several means of fixing those messy backgrounds.

They all rely on the same basic method. We take an original copy of the photo, and duplicate it in a new layer. We then make our changes in the new layer. There are a number of ways of merging the two layers. You can use masks, selections or simply erase what you don't want - I'll leave that up to you.

	So, here's our initial holiday snap, but the background is just way too messy and the foreground is not too hot either!
	So, firstly I sharpen up the picture, in this case just an unsharp mask, but you can use other techniques.
	Now, duplicate the layer. Then either using the magic wand or freehand create a selection around the foreground object, cut it out. Then apply Gaussian blur remove any blur in front of your subject. Tip: A heavy gaussian blur can often leave very obvious gradients in colour. Try applying 30% random noise first, or blur in small stages with some noise thrown in the middle. This stops the obvious colour banding.
	View the two layers together.
	This version has the background saturation and contrast reduced. It may not work so well on this image, but will on other types. Be prepared to try several things to clear the clutter effectively.
	Of course, you can always swap the background altogether. Tip: Swapping backgrounds looks easy, but you need to match colour tones, angle of camera, direction of light, type of light and so much more that this trick is harder to pull off than it looks.
	Tip: Blurring the newly pasted background can help
	Tip: Switching to a black and white image makes the merge of two distinct images work much more effectively.

Notes:

With photographic images, working at a small size tends to exagerate the effects and we want to show the effect off strongly as well. In real work, use an image with greater resolution and keep a relatively light hand on the tweaks.