Sometimes it is handy to select one item in a picture so that you can move it around or add it to another image. To experiment with this, we have include two sub-folders of images in our "Lab 2 Images" folder. One folder is named "plates". It contains photos of two porcelain bowls normally displayed in my living room. The other folder is named "backgrounds". It contains some shots I took on my walk home one day that I thought might make good backgrounds.
Pick one of the four plate pictures. You can open them all with Photoshop to decide which one you like. Each image shows a plate on a stand on a display shelf. The plates aren't quite upright in all the photos and there is more background than you really need in most of them. Use the cropping tool to trim out the background and rotate the image until the plate is standing up straight.
The shelves form a fairly monotone background and the plate has a well-defined edge. So, it should not be hard to select everything in the picture other than the plate and its stand using some combination of the magic wand, lasso and shift key. Do it.
Once just the plate is selected, choose "Cut" from the "Edit" menu. This should leave the plate on a plain white background. Select "None" from the "Select" menu to remove the marquee so that you can make sure the background has been removed cleanly. If not, either reload the image and try again or use the zoom tool, the selection tools or even the eraser tool to clean up the problem.
Once you have all the background removed, click the magic wand in the background to select the entire background. Now, select "Inverse" from the Select menu. This inverts the selection so that now the plate rather than the background is selected. At this point choose "Copy" from the "Edit" menu.
Now pick one of the background files. Once the background file you like is open on your screen, select "Paste" from the "Edit menu" to paste the plate onto this new background. This should create a new layer shown as Layer1 in the layers pallete. Use the "Move" tool to position the plate over a nice section of the background image. Use the cropping tool to trim off most of the background. Try this with a few backgrounds to see which you like best.
Flatten all the layers in your image together and then save the image as a JPEG file and put it on your images gallery page.