Hi Bob - I think everyone has their favorite selection techniques. This image took less than 5 minutes to select by:

1 - copy background layer (just in case I mess things up) and work on the background copy

2 - use magnetic lasso at 100% zoom (too much zoom seems to make it go iffy too little introduces larger margins of error) If you run out of screen realty press H to temporarily obtain the hand tool

3 - selecting such a lovely object in the above way should take no more than 2 minutes using a non-W***m tablet

4 - fine tune the selection (it is surprising how tolerant you can be on this) by Shift to add to selection, ALT to subtract from selection
This should take no more than 2 minutes

5 - when not sure about how the image will develop at this creative point (after the selection has been finetuned) CTRL-SHIFT-J then CTRL-J)

You will now discover why background copy is important

But deebs! Do I hear you ask (or is it gg approaching?) you I mean we now have 2 copies of the same object, why?

Well, to be safer still do CTRL-J again - users of layer blending options will know that it's nice to limit a blend (no, not single malt this time :) ) That should make it 3 copies of the primary object

6 - activate the top copy and move to layer blending options Maybe a dash of Multiply with tweaked Opactity & Fill?

At this stage it really is better to play with the effects to build a personal memory of what they do

<http://imageshack.us>

I tried to send this as a layered TIF (apparently imageshack supports TIF TIFFs) as a way to get a layered image to you but - well, it eventually appears as a PNG

<http://img425.imageshack.us/img425/710/aha4smallest4qf.png>

Robert_SJoyner

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Clone tool - feathering edges to blend