Kathleen Boeckman - "Selections"

To select the chair from its background, I used the magnetic lasso tool. Once I had the chair completely selected, I inverted the selection and used the eraser tool to erase the background. I then zoomed in to about 500 percent, used progressively smaller eraser brush sizes, and erased the stray pixels left from the background. I also cropped the image to remove most of the excess background.

I used Filter > Sharpen Edges and Filter > Sharpen More. After that, I reselected the chair (used magic wand to select background and inverted the selection) and used the Refine Edge command. I then reselected the background and used the paint bucket to add a light peach background to complement the chair. I created adjustment layers to adjust the Curves, Levels, Color Balance, and Hue/Saturation. Finally, I reselected the chair from the background layer, created a new layer with just the chair, and added the drop shadow effect. To get the effect I wanted, I used the following settings for the shadow: 54% opacity, 6px distance, 8% spread, 18px size, anti-aliased, 10% noise.