I would highly recommend you learn to use LAYER MASKs. Basically I think the idea (as some other have said) is to sythesize a shorter depth of field. You want to know that what is in the droplet in focus is showing the objects in the background. One advantage of out of focus effect is that the selection is generally not as critical.

What I did:

1. Duplicate Layer
2. Used the Laso to quickly outline the object
3. Used the magic wand at about a sensitivity of 10 (pretty low) to clean up the laso selection (used Shift to add to the selection and ALT to remove over selection).
4. Used Selection Modify/Modify/Exapand by 20 pixels
5. Used Selection Feather by 20 pixels
6. Invert Selection (I was selecting what I wanted to see and in the end I wanted to select the background)
7. Set selection to the LAYER MASK (there is a dotted circle at the bottom of the history pallete that does this with one click). You will see on the line for the layer both a color and a B&W selection image. If you click on the selection image, you can edit the mask using almost any drawing tool (the mask is 8-bits per pixel). You can make the mask visible by going into channels and clicking on it (the default is to turn it red with 50% transparency). BECAUSE you are editing the MASK and not the image itself you can go back and forth and even save the PSD file at whatever point you are at. JUST BE CAREFUL to edit the MASK and not accidently the image itself.
8. I clicked on the image of the duplicate layer and then FILTER/BLUR/GAUSIAN and set the blur to 30. A nice thing with layer masks as opposed to selection, you dont have the "marching ants" obscuring the image). I did not spend a lot of time on this, but if I was, I would may have gone back and edit the MASK to make sure the edge of the buble was sharp.

There are a lot of variations on the above, but layer masks are the best thing I have found for compositing images.

I'm not sure the effect you wanted, but below is what I did in about 5 minutes:

http://www.fototime.com/{1E399323-B2FD-4CD0-BE74-2194593B4A4D}/picture.JPG

binkybarnes wrote:
> cool picture! in photoshop, first create a duplicate layer and work
> in that layer. use the magnetic lasso tool to select the drop of
> water and whatever else you want to keep. then, under the 'select'
> menu, choose 'inverse' and erase everything. you can then click on
> the eye next to the original layer to hide it, and voila!
>
>
> koo22 wrote:
> > Hi. I know I should have planned this better, but I'm just
> > beginning to work with layers in Photoshop, and can't figure out
> > the best way to remove the background objects from this picture,
> > behind the drop of water. Can someone tell me the easiest way to
> > do this? I want to remove the objects directly to the left & right
> > of the drop. Thanks! K.
> > http://www.pbase.com/image/912139.jpg
>

--
Karl