Soft Edges

Before 

After

The photograph of the teddy bear after is a demonstration of how I utilized the select and mask feature to isolate the bear from the background, maintaining it's individual hairs on the object. This process was fairly easy once I understood what was needed to do as I was able to select and deselect  the object of interest. Masking the rest of the background was also fairly simple, brushing over the edges, softening it in order for it to make the object less rigid. I will definitely use this technique in my future works.