Here's a great trick for creating a floating border from within your digital photograph. This technique will also be great practice for desaturating, selecting, and linking layers.

Until recently I'd been using desaturate to convert photographs to black and white in Photoshop. In fact there is a much better non-destructive method.

Use Photoshop CS2 to create selective coloring in a photo or graphic. This entails desaturating (removing color from) certain elements of a picture and leaving (or enhancing) other colors in a photograph. I will show you how to do this using mask layers.

What can you do to fix a poorly defined background in an otherwise great portrait? You have a wide variety of options, but the quickest (and easiest) way for me is to desaturate the background to make the foreground stand out more.