magnetic lasso woes

[hesaias]

I posted this image in the Critique forum, and one of the suggestions was to use lens blur on the background, and to adjust the black statue to be "more black". To pull this off, I had to select the statue and seperate it from the background in CS. I used the magnetic lasso tool, but it was a pain and took quite a while to do. If you look closely, the whiskers were the hardest part. Can anyone give me some tips on selecting a foreground image like this, or tell ma about a plug-in for PS?

Thankshttp://www.hesaias.com/images/North%20Gate2.jpg

[Shay Stephens]

Stick with what you have ;-)

Bump contrast if you want, but don't mess with the background blur. If you want background blur, that should be done in camera. Doing it after the fact with fine details to mask out is an exercize in frustration that never yields good results.