How to blank out background

phog

I have a picture of a girl under a brolly and I want to highlight both by blackening out the brackground. How do I do this using PS Elements 5?
Also, it is slightly cut off at one side is there a way to crop then frame it centrally in the black background?

Fenster

It'd help if you posted the photo. Preferably in a large-size, uncompressed.

Calina

You need to select - probably using magnetic lasso or magic wand what you want to keep and then under Select, choose inverse.

This should highlight everything you don't want to keep.

Hit backspace or delete.

It will leave a transparent area which you can use paint bucket to fill with black.

That is in general what I would do in PSE5. But as Fenster says, would be easier if I saw the photograph./

phog

This is the picture I was referring to .....

Calina

Okay, this is what I did:

I used the magnetic tool to select what I didn't want to keep and deleted as described above.

My background colour is automatically set to black so it filled that in for me.

I increased the canvas size and that automatically filled with black to fill the empty new background.

I would say though that it doesn't work perfectly because you cut off the little girls feet when creating the photograph.

And I did use PSE5 for it, by the way

phog

Thanks Calina - that's kind of what I was aiming for - I'll give it a go.