Editing Assistance, please!

My little girl, London, was born on Sept 4th. I'm working on cleaning up this photo to use for birth announcements. I use PSE for image editing & shoot raw (though I don't think that helps me much here).

I want to do away with the blue background. I've come across several methods of replacing backgrounds & colors, but I can't get it to be seamless. My PS skills are limited, so seeking some help (I've seen some excellent PS work in these forums). I'd settle for making it white or whatever else looks simple & natural.

I'm wondering if anyone can provide some examples/steps to take in PSE to help clean this up.

Thanks!
Matthew

I took a quick try at replacing the background; the image doesn't have enough resolution to invest a lot of time...with a raw or hi-res file much more could be done. I masked off the blue/green background by using the Color Range command to select it; then sampled the white and pink from the blanket and head band and used those colors with the Render > Clouds filter to make a new background.

duplicate layer ...replace color ...layer mask hope this helps

Thank you both. A big sticking point for me is fine tuning the edges when making a selection. I've done some research and am practicing with defringing/feathering methods. In a perfect world I would have gotten the shot right the first time (with a cleaner background), but this will have to do.

Thanks!

Good Job Pixel :P

Here's a quick edit.

Duplicated layer.
Quick select to select the background (including the white just above her back).
Paint bucket to fill the selected background (using the dropper to grab the whitest part of the blanket).
Paintbrush as 20% opacity to blend edges.

Edges aren't perfect but they could be if you really took your time at it.

Lovingbliss wrote in post #15016462
Here's a quick edit.

Duplicated layer.
Quick select to select the background (including the white just above her back).
Paint bucket to fill the selected background (using the dropper to grab the whitest part of the blanket).
Paintbrush as 20% opacity to blend edges.

Edges aren't perfect but they could be if you really took your time at it.

If you're interested in editing her skin at all, I could do it for you or there's a nice free action here:

http://www.thecoffeesh​opblog.com …owderroom-free-pspse.html

She's darling, BTW, and shares a birthday with my now six-year-old.

nice edit

I'm a little late, but I have been watching some how-to videos on Kelby and playing around in Photoshop a bit...so here is a very, very amateur attempt using the blanket as the background: