I’m aaaaall about communication as you well know by now! I want to make sure that everyone is on the same page now that I’m writing my tutorials (I’ve started them and the first publishes on tomorrow). So for those who are extremely new to Photoshop, here are the steps for what I mean when I say…
“Select the subject”. When I say this, I mean to use the quick select tool 
to drag and draw a line of marching ants around your subject. You may need to zoom in as you do it to make sure that you don’t miss a finger or that the selection doesn’t jump out to select other things. Up towards the top, you’ll see this: 
which is what you use to choose whether you’re adding to or subtracting from your selection. The bigger the brush, the faster it will select but also, the less attention it will pay to detail around the edges.
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“Feather selection” By this, I mean to go to select > feather selection and then decide how many pixels outward I want the selection (usually between 1 and 1.8 pixels) to feather. This provides a softer edge to your selection.
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“Make a new layer out of your selection” After using the quick selection tool to make your line of marching ants and feathered the edges, simply type ctrl+j and it will turn your selection into it’s own layer so you can edit the background without affecting the top layer.
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“Make the subject a new layer” All three steps above are what I do to make the subject (exe kids in the foreground) into it’s own layer to edit the background separately from the foreground.
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“Clip the layer” If you drag a layer above another layer in the layers palette, you can type ctrl+g to clip the upper layer into the lower one to make them one. Then you can select different blending modes and opacities to apply an effect.
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“Duplicate the layer” To duplicate a layer, you right click it in the palette and click ‘duplicate layer’
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“Add gaussian blur” Done in filters > blur > gaussian blur
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“Apply a texture” Open the texture as you would any other image. Drag it onto the image you’re editing. Draw the corners in or out to resize it to match the image. If you don’t want it to affect the foreground, drag it where you want it in the layers palette on the right.
