Compositing Quick Tips - The Photoshop: Professional Retouching and Compositing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques - page 291

Tip
For speed, rather than using a brush to paint in the area below the horizon line,
you could make a selection of that area with the Rectangular Marquee tool and
then choose Edit > Fill > Contents > Black. Any gaps could then be quickly filled
with a medium soft-edged brush.
Compositing into Grass
Now we'll put the giraffe that we cut out in Chapter 1 into the long grass. This is very easy
to do using the same brush we just used to create the horizon line.
1. With the giraffe positioned above the layers that go into making the background,
click the thumbnail of the layer containing the grass ( Figure 5.14 ) . Use the Lasso
tool to make a rough selection of the area around the giraffe's hooves ( Figure
5.15 ) , and go Layer > New > Layer via Copy (or press Command/Ctrl+J).
Figure 5.14