How to Slim a dog's body/Cleaning up of shadows on background paper

Hi!

The key is to use a large brush in Liquify. 

Here is your image with the filter applied. I used a 50-pixel brush and placed the brush so the middle of the brush outline is over the edge of the dog's fur, and gently moved it in a little bit at a time.

Then I used Color Range to select the outside area:

After I had my selection, I feathered it by 3 pixels and sampled the yellow color at the top of the image, and on a duplicate image, I used the Fill with Foreground Color (Option+Delete) to fill the area and get rid of the shadow at the bottom.

Here is the end result:

Let us know if that work for you,

Michelle

[Moderator note : Two images deleted as original poster did not have the rights to use the image and requested they be deleted]

1st of all, that's a verrrryyy cute dog pics!

How adept are you with Photoshop? Beginner, intermediate.

To slim the dog's body naturally I'd suggest you use the Liquify filter and selectively & very gently "nudge" the areas in that you'd like to slim up a bit. I'd suggest you "freeze" (there's a tool to do that in that on left side of the interface) areas surrounding where you want to nudge/move content so you don't distort or affect them. Then you can unfreeze them (diff. tool) when finished. Neither image looks particularly chubby. So not sure where you want to slim it. I've never tried the facial recognition tools (right side of interface) on an animal... but you might want to experiment with that too.

If you want to generally slim the whole dog - vs. selected parts - you could go into the Camera Raw Filter & down to the Optics section and adjust the Aspect Ratio a bit - just slide the slider different directions to taste.

Another option for slimming is to use Content Aware Scale. You can either use it globally on the dog or select portions of the dog to do the scaling on (moving it in or out).

To get rid of the vignetting in corners at bottom of the image you could start by trying a Content Aware Fill using the Custom vs Auto option. To ensure you only have it grab content from the brighter yellow area. Make your selection of the vignetted area you want to remove then go into the Content Aware Fill interface. You could also sample from the color background you prefer and paint over the vignetted areas (I'd suggest a lower flow brush if you go that route).

If you're a rank beginner then I'd suggest you Google tutorials for those tools online.... And, I'm assuming it's your image or free stock photography with no licensing limitations and you have the right the noodle with the images... Good luck.