Reducing blemishes in the background

In the next few movies, we'll be working on this fashion photograph, which was…captured by one of my students, Ben Bassu.…What we want to do here initially is clean up the background and then in the…next movie or the following movie, we'll want to work on the skin.…Let's do first things first.…Well, you'll notice in the Layers panel there are two layers, a Background and…then a Final layer where all the retouching has been completed.…While we're not going to do all of this retouching,…what I do want to do is get us going saying hey!…How do we start to get to this place?…One of the first steps of course is to work on some of the background or…surrounding elements.…

Now if we zoom-in on this image, one of things that we'll notice is there are a…lot of blemishes here in the background.…We need to remove those.…So let's copy the Background layer.…Press Command or Ctrl+J to do so.…Then double-click the layer name.…Let's name this one bg.…Next we'll zoom-out.…We need to build up a selection of this background.…