Here’s another cereal box baby announcement example.  The following things were done in the process of making this:

• Cutting out the boy.  The masking of the (really fun) hair could have been quite difficult, but was made significantly easier by the fact that the background was somewhat white, and pretty much the same color.  I just went around the outer edge of the hair with a dodging brush to brighten the lighter areas, so they were mostly white.  To soften the hard shadows on the left of his hair, I painted into the edges of the shadows with a big soft brush, with low opacity, in Lighten mode, using the color of the surrounding background.  The results would be similar if you used the clone tool with partial opacity, but doing it that way you have to worry about introducing new texture, instead of just a color correction.
• Skin glow. For the skin, I did the typical process of doing a Surface Blur on a copy of the image, and then painting in a mask to specify where to use it.  And that is pretty much anywhere that the skin should be soft (no crease, edge, or hair areas).  This process does 2 things: 1) it gets rid of any imperfections in the skin and 2) it gives the skin an nice healthy glow to it.
• Background gradient. I ended up using a big radial gradient on the background, but instead of just going from white to dark blue, and added a lighter blue, more in the cyan range, into the middle of the gradient.  Adding a slightly different middle color tends to give a little more depth and not just feel like a linear fade between two colors.  And (at least to me) it gives the feel of the white area “glowing” rather than just fading to blue.

For a bigger version of the final nouncement, go to the gallery.