Photoshop Help with image

[Keith Carmichael]

Yes, I can, as it will provide temporary relief from my own burdensome responsibilities.

Okay, so two things:
1-The snake is in a tube, the rat is not
2-the edges of the snake background are blurred out

If you just want to blur the edges, it’s very easy and there’s a hundred ways to do it. Here is one. Enter quick mask mode by pressing this button at the end of your toolbar.

Using a large, very very blurry (hardness set to zero) black brush, paint the rat red. (Yes, you will use a black paintbrush, the result will look red.) It should look like this: (where the word “should” is understood to be used very loosely. What on earth is this FOR, anyways?)

Then click the quick mask button to leave quick mask mode. You should see this:

Now that you’ve blurrily selected the edges of the image, you can lighten them any way you want to–i’d go to hue/lum/sat and drive the lightness up. Or use an adjustment layer if you’re a fan of nondestructive editing (i.e, frightened of commitment.)

Now, do you want the rat to actually be IN the tube? Then you have to cut the rat out of its background, which is again, something there are many ways to do. Cutting things out of backgrounds has been a prime concern of human beings since the earliest of ages.

Here is a very basic approach you could try.

-Open both images
-choose the Move tool and drag the rat onto the snake (once again, WHAT are you doing this for?)
-select the layer with the rat, go to layer, layer mask, “reveal all”
-look in the layers panel and select the LAYER MASK FOR THE RAT LAYER, not the rat layer itself (just click the little white square)
-use a soft black brush to paint out the rat’s background.

Good luck!