Hint!

Alright, for those who are still playing with the image and working on learning photoshop, I have decided to give you a hint that will make things easier. Of course, like with other things in life this is not the only way one can go about this process...

Since the image is against a monochrome background (blue screen) the easiest way to select the subject in the picture is to select the background first and than invert the selection. If one were to use the photoshop wand selection tool with a discontinuous selection a single click should highlight all the blue background. Once you have selected the background, inverting the selection is done by selecting inverse from the select menu, or for those who like hot keys (CTRL+Shift+I). Now the subject of the picture is selected and can be copied (Ctrl+C) and pasted (Ctrl+V) into another image. Presto, resize and position the snippet and you have completed a photo compilation. Don't I make it sound so easy...

Of course the task is much more difficult when trying to take the subject from a picture that has a non-monochrome background. But I have found in my years of playing with images on the computer it is by far easier to select the background and invert the selection because typically background will have less color variation than the subject of the photo. Of course that is not always the case when the background is foliage, shadow intensive or has a lot of detail.