Creating Clean Selections

I have had lots of enquiries about how to take several pictures and combine them into one. The problem seems to arise after making the selection, copying and pasting. There always seem to be a little bit of the original background connected to our selections. Unfortunately I personally don't know of an "easy" fix for this. What I will do here is show one way I combine images. The first image below is going to be my background for the finished product. I will place another image that is a selection from a totally different image into this one. I purposely chose very extreme color differences in the two images to better show the work that needs to be done.

The image below is the one I'm going to take my selection from. You probably guessed, I just want to get that guy out of there and onto my castle image.

The first thing I'm going to do is look at where I'm going to put this guy in the new image. I want to place him in the lower left corner of my castle image and I see lots of browns and dark colors down there so I'm going to choose black to work with. I use black as my foreground color and with the shapes tool with the rectangular shape, I will cover as much of the image as I possible can without getting into what I want to use. Below you can see that I have most of the background now changed to black.

Now, I'm going to use the magic wand and get as close to my image with the selection as I can. As you can see below I have a lot of work to do. All those little dots that are not directly connected to the selection I want have to be deselected. I do that by using the magic wand and holding down the shift key at the same time. I'll do my best to get everything but the selection line around the whole image and the selection line around my character clean.

When I've got it the best I can, I invert the selection and copy the selection to the clipboard and then paste it as a new image. Boy you can sure see what I missed now. But that's alright because we can still do some cleaning up, but first.....

Before I do any cleaning up, I want to add a layer to my newly created image. I want to move the new layer to the bottom of the layer stack. Then since I chose to use black, I want to use the flood fill tool and black on the new layer. Once I do that I can see where there still needs to be some work done. I see some little white spots I'll want to change to black. Before I can do that, I need to merge the layers.

Once the layers are merged, I'll set my spray paint nozzle to 1 pixel and very carefully paint over the little white dots and I'll end up with something like below.

Now, I have a fairly clean image to work with. Again, using the magic wand tool, I click anywhere on the black part of the canvas, invert my selection which will look like the image below.

I now have a "fairly" clean image to paste to my background. There will be a little cleanup around the edges, a pixel here a pixel there. I use the eyedropper tool to match the colors where I need to, the spray paint tool, to fill the color where I need it one pixel at a time. The image below had a little bit of black around the edges that I could see in the grass area. I took the spray paint tool after using the eye dropper to pick up one of the green colors and did my filling in.

I could just as easily chose a green color to do my work above in. At any rate, that is the simplest way I have found to get my image selections clean enough to paste onto another image and make it look like it belonged there.