blacking out background of an object

[nadea]

how do you black out the background? any help would be appreciated! i am trying to back out around a photo of a painting.

[t2suggas]

Add a new layer, and move it down, so it is underneath the painting.

Select the layer with the painting on it, and magic wand+Ctrl (you may need to adjust the tolerance) the background, when you have selected all of the background, press delete on your keyboard.

[nadea]

i added a layer underneath, am using the ctrl and figured out how to delete the surrounding area but the wand is eating into tiny pieces of the painting at the edges- minor but noticeable because its a painting. also, how do i get the background to be black, with the paintbucket? should i get the 2nd layer black before or after?

[t2suggas]

Start again.

Open a new Paint.Net.

Fill the white image with black.

Go to Layers, Import from file, and import your painting. You may be asked to resize your canvas, click ok to this. This will put the painting on the top.

Click with magic wand and Ctrl to add to magic wand selection. Once you have selected most of the background, press delete.

You could Gaussian blur the edges so they aren't so noticeable.

[crosswalker]

One way to make sure the whole painting doesn't blur when gaussian blurring(I find that doing a gaussian blur on a selection gives bad results) is to duplicate the layer that you want to blur, on the lower "to-be-blurred" layer, do your gaussian blur. Then, adjust the transparency on the duplicate layer till you get satisfactory results.