Magazine Draft Two

I am having some difficulty with using photoshop, I am finding it confusing to use and I have spent many hours trying to figure it out. However my work doesn't look of a professional standard so I have decided to move onto Serif Draw Plus to complete my magazine.

Here is a new image I have decided to consider for my magazine cover as the antagonists are in this shot, this look very sinister looking. Black is mainly used to connote death, this is one of the covers my target audience said they would want to see on a magazine over. I found this out through my questionnaire.

Here I am removing the background of an image, as I didn't require some of the image, so I used the cut out studio to do this. On this image you can see that the background has been removed so I was just trying to smoothen out the lines on the image as best as possible, so it looks of a professional standard.

Here is another image I put in the cut out studio and this image demonstrates the background being removed from as I only wanted the mask I didn't want the background.

Here is the image after it had been in the cut out studio, and then I used the editing technique called feathering to make the edges of the photo look smooth. So this is the image I have decided to use as the dominant image on my magazine. 

This is an image before I got rid of any of the background on the cut out studio.

This is where I used the feather tool and you can also alter the opacity, the blue and the cut off so you an have it to what ever way blends best with your work.