Cleaning up a background

I'm trying to learn some basics of editing. I do very minor stuff in LR usually, adjustments and such. Then I got the shot below. I just grabbed the camera quick and I only got a couple shots off. It was actually an accident as I would have adjusted the exposure, but I love what came out. The lights in the family room were off, but the dining room lights lit the subjects perfectly. I just want to get rid of the TV image. I was trying with the magic lasso in PSE8, but then there was a bright line along the edge of it. What is the best way to do something like this?

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Clone tool...just a couple minutes to do

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no..don't use the clone tool, that looks like crap. I'm going to try something I've done with some different style photos, I'm not sure how it will work with this but I'll post up the result.

So what 'looks like crap' about what was done with the clone tool?...the background on the left is pretty uniform, working at 500% I was very careful to not oblterate any of the detail in the fur which was present in the original photo!

Making it entirely black makes the dog's fur look cut out, the key is to pull more focus away from it without entirely eliminating the screen.

The Framed Life wrote in post #12440917
Making it entirely black makes the dog's fur look cut out, the key is to pull more focus away from it without entirely eliminating the screen.

But if you look very closely at the original pixels, the pixels were either blue or fur...and I merely replaced any blue with black. I understand the issues of 'cut out' and certainly if I wanted to spend more than two minutes I could have simply cloned individual pixels from the edges of fur on other parts of the dog, but nobody was paying for first class effort!

Thanks guys. I hope to spend some more time learning this stuff at some point. But the 2 subjects along with all their cohorts make it difficult to make that time. I need longer days...

Wilt's work very good, but thought I would take a slightly different approach to see what I could get. I'm using Photoshop Elements 9.

In order to avoid making a hard edge on the dog, I used the Magic Selection Tool to select the dog's head first with a Tolerance of 5. Then I feathered the edge by one pixel.

Having done that, I inverted the selection and used the selection brush set to Remove From Selection to reduce the selected area to just the television receiver and the wall below it, with the dog making the right-hand (feathered) boundary.

Next, I created a new layer with the selection still active.

Then I used the the Clone Stamp Tool to sample the wall above the television, switched to the new layer as the active layer, and painted into the selection on that layer.

Finally, I cropped just a bit from the top and right, keeping the 2:3 aspect ratio.

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Beautiful catch. I thought I'd take it a step further. Like Wilt, I didn't spend a whole lot of time on the edges which could still be cleaned up quite a bit.

Cropped to 10x8, dropped in a new background, a little color and curves adjustment.

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The background is more of a dark brown than a black.
I made a selection around the TV and the left side of the dog.
Refined the edge to get as many as the stray hairs and whiskers as possible, then decontaminated the edges.
Filled the selection with sampled color after using the eye dropper to sample the color of the background above the TV.
On another layer I masked the background and used a foreground to transparent gradient using the sampled color, applied to the mask, and with the opacity turned down to 50%.

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Wow. Those are all awesome! I definitely need to start reading my Elements book I bought (I do have 9, not 8 like I said in my first post) Thanks for all the help and pointers!

The dog sits on that chair like that all the time, my daughter just got up next to him like that one time. Those 2 are like best friends. This one was last year when they were both quite a bit younger.

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