Select the Background Behind My Subject?

Get the Magic Wand tool from the Toolbox (its icon looks like a wand . . . with magic; or press Shift-W until you have it) and click it once in the area you want to select. If it’s a solid, contiguous area of color, like a nice blue sky or a solid-colored wall, it’ll probably select the entire thing with one click, and now you can edit just that area. If it selected part of it, but not all of it, press-and-hold the Shift key (this lets you add to what you currently have selected) and click on the part that didn’t get selected (for example, if your blue sky had clouds, it may not have selected them, so press-and-hold the Shift key and click on each area of clouds to add them to your selection). Now, if it selected too much (it spilled over into areas you didn’t want to be selected), there are three things you can do: (1) Deselect the area you selected by pressing Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) and start over by clicking on a different part of what you wanted to select (for example, if you clicked on the right side of the sky and it selected too much, deselect and maybe start by clicking on the left side of the sky and see how that looks. It works more times than you’d think). (2) Deselect, then go up to the Options Bar and lower the Tolerance amount from its default setting of 30. This determines the range of colors it will include, so typing in a lower number (like 20 or 10 or 5) means it won’t expand out so far and will include fewer colors. Or, (3) switch to the Lasso tool (L), press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and draw over the areas that the Magic Wand tool selected that you didn’t want selected. This removes those areas from the selection.