I have pictures of some of my cakes that are older (before I started using a solid background) that I would like to change so that all the backgrounds look similar in my portfolio. I have photoshop elements on my computer, but am running into some issues trying to change the color.

Has anyone done this and can you give me a walk-through or some tips??

TIA

AIf the pictures are not on a solid color background, your best bet is to use the lasso tool (try the magnetic lasso first, if that doesn't work I find the polygonal lasso easy to work with) to draw a border around the cake. Depending on the image this may be a painstaking task if you end up having to manually adjust the selection (using the regular lasso tool to add to or take away from the selection or contracting/expanding/feathering) after the lasso is complete.

Once you have the selection you can just copy and paste it to its own layer in a new document in front of your background.

ADoes it have a magic wand? I have another program that does. If your cakes are mostly solid colors and well lit, you can select your cake using the magic wand, holding down the shift key, and it will select large chunks at a time. Then you can copy and paste onto your new background. I recommend taking a photo of a real background, rather than just making it white behind the cake. Floating cakes are not a good look!

APhotoshop Elements does have a magic wand...if there is enough contrast between the cake and the background the magic wand can be a good starting point but you'll probably still have a lot of work to do around the edges of the selection with the lasso or marquee tools.

Thank you! The one I'm working on is my Octopus cake, so there's a lot of little tentacles to go around. It has a lot of colors on it too, so I've had to go around it with the eraser. I have it to where the background is all gray/white checkerboard. Can I take a pic of the background that I use now and insert it??

AIf you have already removed the background you can create a new layer under the existing layer and paste the new background picture into the new layer.