Does the camera lie?

Sometimes a shot requires a much better background for it to be a satisfying shot. Take this one for instance.

With a little work this same bird looks more at home here.

To make these changes required only a few easily learned processes

1. Selection
2. Clean up using a mask
3. Cloning
4. Selecting layers to be worked.

Selection can be done in so many ways - my preferred method is with the Lasso tool.
I made a rough selection of the bird and then pressed Ctrl+J which is the short-cut for "Copy and Paste".
To make the cleaning up of the selection really clear I then filled the background with a colour - If I had used either black or white I would have run into problems with finding the edges but with a colour I had no difficulties at all.
I then clicked on the bird layer and created a mask (small button on the Layers Palette) and with a soft edged brush and black as the foreground colour I painted away the wall and back of the chair that were still showing around the edges of the bird.
Then I created a background.
Here is the original shot I took for the background.

The stick looks good - but it is too high up in the picture. the left hand side of the picture is too bright and draws the eye over to see the fence and post in the background. Two things to fix up here. The stick first.

Just as with the bird I drew around the stick with the lasso tool and Ctrl+J to make a copy. In the Layers palette (shown on the right of this picture) you can see the stick as a layer - but looking at the picture you cannot see any difference at all.
With the move tool I dragged the stick closer to the bottom of the picture. Again a mask was created and the surrounds to the stick cleaned away. I did not want the original stick to be still in the picture so I then Clicked on the background and used the Stamp or Clone tool to sample in different places and replace the stick with leaves.

Another image was opened and part of that was selected to be used to fill the light area of background behind the stick.

To select this a rectangular selection tool was used and I clicked "Copy" (Ctrl+C)
I then opened the background picture I was working on, clicked on the background (in the Layers Palette) and clicked "Paste" (Ctrl+V)

The bird picture was opened again, the layer highlighted and selected (Ctrl+A). Double click on the background to open it again and Paste the bird and put him on the branch.
It all sounds mighty complicated but look at the list of processes that were used - only four!
So does the camera lie? Did I see a bird on the back of a chair on my veranda or did I see it in the garden?

AJ