Eliminating section of photo

I am an amateur at Photoshop. I started using it in December of last year. it is Photoshop CS5 Extended.
I have an image with two people in it.
One person is partially in back of the other.Essentially no gap whatsoever between them.
I need to remove the person in the back, so that only the front person and any surrounding landscape are visible.
I've made numerous attempts at using techniques like Pen->Path->Edit-

Fill, but the results are completely unsatisfactory, as I keep

getting pixels from the person I am eliminating no matter how I trace the Pen path.

Can someone lead me in the right direction to perform this action? A tutorial perhaps? (I've tried several I found, but as noted the results are terrible).
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.

On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:10:35 +0000, Omicron wrote
(in article
):

I am an amateur at Photoshop. I started using it in December of last year. it is Photoshop CS5 Extended.
I have an image with two people in it.
One person is partially in back of the other.Essentially no gap whatsoever between them.
I need to remove the person in the back, so that only the front person and any surrounding landscape are visible.
I've made numerous attempts at using techniques like Pen->Path->Edit-

Fill, but the results are completely unsatisfactory, as I keep

getting pixels from the person I am eliminating no matter how I trace the Pen path.

Can someone lead me in the right direction to perform this action?

Try Layer/Matting/Defringe...

Experiment with the number of pixels in the Width box.

Having said that, I'm not entirely clear what you're trying to do. If you cut out the back person, you will leave a gap in your picture. Assuming you want the background to fill that space, why not start instead by selecting the front person, paste that person into a new layer and clone the existing background over the back person. You can then defringe the front person selection as necessary.

But maybe I'm missing the point.