I am having a little problem with blurring the background of an image to emphasize the object in front.......I am getting a soft glow around the selected image, can anyone help me achieve magazine like work, please.....

I don't know if this is magazine work, but the Magic Wand made a quick selection of the background. Under the Secect menu you can go to Modify to Expand, Contract, etc your selection. I also put in a new gradient background using the colors that appeared in your image. In CS3 you have the Refine Edges which can also adjust the selection.

dc

I am having a little problem with blurring the background of an image to emphasize the object in front.......I am getting a soft glow around the selected image, can anyone help me achieve magazine like work, please.....

Make a mask of the area you want to blur, keeping the edge of the mask at the same level of softness as the actual edge between the arm and background. Then use that mask in the Lens Blur Filter. Run your blur on a duplicate layer. If the edge appears a little too harsh or abrupt, apply the same mask to the blurred layer.

The filter is meant to mimic Depth of Field effects from different focus levels in a camera lens and uses greyscale values in the mask to determin the level of blurring. The halos you are seeing with Gaussian blur are one of the things the Lens Blur is meant to avoid.

Hi ibayley,
I made a selection of the leg, ctrl&j to float it to its own layer above the bg. The bg Edit,transform,distort, moved the left side until the soft glow is gone.
Ray