Yeah, the blur takes care of the dark lines very well and going lighter or darker brings the leaves down some. Cool.
What did you use to get a blur?
Here is my fix. In LR I selected the selective brush, turned down Clarity, Sharpness and noise, and brushed it in.
Screenshot attached.
@hark Did you begin in PS? Mousing a lasso tool around is like nowhere man, for me anyway lol. Even brush strokes are dangerous, never could stay inside the lines.
Thanks again for your input.
Thanks for your input, that is a definite improvement. When blurring, do you set the noise to the plus side? It appears so in the screenshot.
While brushing the slider choices in, do you use a mask and reveal the results in the end or, immediate results while brushing?
Many ways of doing this.
In PS - I would select the dog using quick selection tool and refine edge. This is way easier than trying to use lassoo tool selection.
Once you have this save as - New layer with selection mask.
Then you can add a new layer below this and fill it with whatever you want.
In V1 I used a radial gradient fill
Another easy way is to duplicate the initial layer then apply a gaussian blur filter to the top layer. You can adjust the amount of blur to suit your taste.
Then add a mask to this top blurred layer and paint the mask with a black brush to remove (hide) the blur on the dog. See V2