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Okay, so many of you said you liked the background that I replaced on this picture:

…and several of you said you’d be interested in how I did this.  So here’s how you do it…

I first opened my image in photoshop.  Here’s the original I’m going to change:

And I also opened the background I’m going to use.  I bought this “digital paper” off etsy from this shop HERE.

To make the background look a little more realistic you need to blur it (I forgot this step, so I added this later, which is more complicated, so in the following pictures pretend I had done this here).  So I add a guassian layer onto the paper.  To do this: Filer>Blur>Gaussian Blur.  Now play with the slider to however much you think for the image you are using it on.  For me, I look at how far away my subject is from the background and looking at the original image how blurry the original background is, I try to match the blur to that.  It’s all about what you think will look realistic.  On this particular image I set the blur around 8.0-10.0, others I’ve got anywhere between 4-6.  Here’s what the paper looks like after adding the blur:

Make sure the move tool is selected and now I just drag my paper onto the top of my photo like this:

Now free transform (ctrl-T) and hold shift (keeps the original shape) while you drag the background to completely cover the background you are replacing.  You can make this a lot larger than the background if you’d like your pattern to be larger.

Hit enter or the little check at the top of the screen to keep it that size.

Now you’ll want to make sure the background layer is selected and change the blending mode to something different so you can see through it.

Where it says “normal” I changed that to “overlay,” like so:

You can see the background but also see the photo through it.  This helps to see where you are going to paint.

Now, making sure your background is still selected, add a layer mask to the background layer.  Click this button and it adds the white box onto the layer like this:

Now click on the white layer and you can paint onto it to mask out parts of the background.

To paint, select the brush from the tools, then select the color black.  If your colors are black and white like this, you can just click the little arrow next to the colors and it will flip the black/white swatches.

Now adjust your brush size and hardness here by using the sliders:

And you can adjust brush opacity if you need to.  I start with 100%.

(Once again make SURE, before you paint, that your white mask box is selected, not the background because you will be mad later if you do this step wrong!  Click on the white box, not just the layer!)

Start painting your black brush onto where you want to remove the background.  Remember, for masking, black conceals, white reveals.  Meaning, if you want the background paper to show, paint white on the mask, if you want to hide parts of the background paper, paint black on your mask.  So I start with a large, soft brush and paint over the main parts of the photo I want to hide… like so:

 

If you look at my layer mask box to the bottom right you’ll see the places I painted black.  Continue painting black with a smaller brush around the edges.  As you get into the small details you can switch from a black brush to a white one to get the edges to look right.  I’ll paint black and if I do too much I’ll just paint white back on.

For straight lines I’ll use the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and drag it along where my line is, then paint inside the box with black.  This gives me a perfect line without having to do it by hand and having it look wavy. You can even inverse your selection (ctrl-shift-I) and paint white onto the opposite selection if you need to refine the other side of the line.

Depending on the image, I can also use this tool (Quick selection tool (W) ) to select the baby (make sure you first select your background layer) and baseboard then (reselect  your mask layer) paint that selection black quickly.  The only problem is that the edges are a bit funny looking, jagged and a bit harsh.

Here I’ve selected around the baby and clothes and baseboard (with my background layer visibility turned off so I could see what I was doing).  Or I could have just selected the background and inversed the selection.

Now turning the visibility of my background layer back on and selecting the mask again, here I am painting the black onto the mask.  You can see I’ve just done part of the left side around his ear and head.

Here it is all painted in.

Here’s what it looks like deselected.  It definitely doesn’t look finished!  It looks a bit harsh and weird.  So now I go around the lines (zoomed in close) and soften them by painting in black or white with a softer brush to make the lines more subtle.

Here’s what my mask look like at this point.

After going around with a soft brush and defining the lines a bit more, here’s what it looks like.  If you look at the picture before you can see the differences around his hair in how harsh the lines looked before, compared to now.   This yellow digital paper wasn’t the best one to use on this background because of the differences in color, which I knew, but it was easier to see, so I’m going to change it out with something else at this point.

I know that because my original background was a bluish-gray, something in a darker/blue color would blend better and make it less noticeable around the edges, so I’m going to trade the yellow for something that will blend better.  I’ll try this one:

 

Opened my digital paper, added a gaussian blur layer at 10.0 px.

Then drug the paper on top of my picture like I did to start with.  Transform (ctrl-T) the layer to fit the picture and hit enter.  Now we have to adjust where the layers are.  This layer should be on top of all your others in your layer palette.   You can just right click this layer and select “create clipping mask” at this point to see if you’ll like it.  You’ll probably have to play with the blending mode to see how you want it to look.

I kinda skipped showing a couple steps here, but I set this layer at normal but took the opacity of the layer down to 37% then took the layer mask and drug it onto this brown polka-dot later, so that’s what it will look like (and deleted the yellow paper).  You can always change the papers, and just move your mask where ever you want it, if you’ve done the mask right you won’t have to do any more masking, just move the mask onto the later you need it on.  I didn’t like the color of the paper with what the baby is wearing, so to make it look like it matches a little better I added a blue layer on top of the mask/background layer.  To do this you select the rectangular tool (U) and change the color to what you want, then drag a box over the background of your picture.  Once you’ve added this (“shape 1″ layer shown above) then you can double click on the color box (I would double click on the baby blue box above) and adjust the color to any color you want.  You can also select the color layer and play with the blending modes of that layer to get different effects.

Here’s what it looks like after changing the background and adding a blue layer on to my paper.  I like this paper and will keep it, but I can see around his hair line that it needs adjusting because his fuzzy hair is too much like a helmet!  So I go back onto my mask and paint in with a softer brush, lower the opacity to like 20% and work on the edges some more.

Here’s a close up after I’ve adjusted the mask and softened the edges.  His hair no longer looks like a perfect helmet.  Looks pretty good, right!?

Here’s the finished photo.  Not sure why the colors look funky in that particular photo (above), but here it is before and after.

So what do you think?  Does it look like a real background?  Will you be trying this out?  Did I lose you on any of the steps?  Leave a comment below!