I used Adobe Photoshop to remove the backgrounds from these pictures of my cats so that we could print them out and use them as decorations for my wife's 30th birthday tea party. Using the trackpad on my Macbook Pro, I used the polygonal lasso tool to make a selection around the cats. I then inverted that selection so that the background was selected instead of the cats and feathered the selection to create a kind of blur/halo effect around the cats which looks pretty neat and also makes them look like they're glowing. In most of these I feathered the selections by 25 pixels, but not all of them. Please see the before and after of each photo below.
In the above photo both cats were looking in the same direction while lying on our bed so I thought it would make a good birthday decoration. Sheila is in the foreground. Ace is in the midground. I removed the background.
In this one Ace had his arms spread way open. Perfect for a decoration! If you look at him sideways it looks like he's leaping at you from out of the screen!
This was a very difficult picture to take because Ace did not like his sushi costume. But I think he looks like the cat's pajamas. The sushi costume did not make it any harder to make the selection around Ace in Photoshop.
This is from when Sheila was a baby. Her ear got chopped off a little in the picture so I wasn't able to fix that with the polygonal lasso tool, which is why there's that awful straight line cutting off part of her ear. I'm still pretty upset about that but what can you do.
This one took a while to make the selection because there are so many angles to her back and her limbs are all over the place.
I decided to keep the box in this one because there are a couple areas where it was hard to tell when the box ends and Sheila's dark fur begins. I didn't want to accidentally cut her out so I kept the box.
Unfortunately, Ace was looking at Sheila and not at the camera but I still feel like I was able to successfully remove the background from this picture.
