Paint Shop Pro v7 » Crop of background
To crop of the background, I use the eraser tool. Follow around the horse with the mouse pointer. This requires some practice. If you cut of to much, you can use the right mouse button to get the original background back (on the area you click on). Be sure that the color who appears when you use the eraser tool is grey and white grids, not solid white (or any other color), because if it is, the background doesn't get transparent and you can't paste the horse on to another background without a white/colored square around it. If it gets solid white, just copy the picture over to a new image (ctrl+A (select all), ctrl+C (copy) and ctrl+V (paste as new image)). When you now start to erase the area around the horse, you will see the grey and white grids. I'll remind you of, if you don't understand how the eraser tool works, that there is a good help-manual in psp.
Make sure you don't use a to small brush, and don't make it to hard. I usually set the size to 15 and the hardness to 60 and the step to 25. That makes the edges on the horse look soft and natural. If you have trouble using a big brush between the ears for example, follow down one of the ears, while cutting off the other ear, then use the right mouse button on the ear that you cut off, and it'll come back ;) If you use a small sized brush there, it’ll be really choppy.
