Bottom one, tell me what you think I know the images are a little to dark, but I couldn't change that

Nice man. A few tips, might help you out with the rifle flare. Have your rifleman layer selected and use the auto-select tool. It's the one where you can just click on the layer and everything selects inside or outside the layer. So select outside of your rifleman. Then go to Select/Feather. Choose something like 2 or 3 for your feather. Now hit delete once or twice, it should tween it up a bit. Remember, there is always Ctrl+Alt+Z to go back a few steps if you mess something up.

Short tutorial on selecting and feather.


So here's the image I'm going to work with and I'm going to take out the lower left soldier.




Select your lasso tool and change your feather settings to 1 or 2. While holding down, trace around the soldier.




This is what you should end up with after you connect the lasso. Copy and paste your selection.




Select the magic wand and click outside your new layer image. You can disable the background layer for better viewing.




Select Feather from the menu.




Choose 2 or 3, press enter. Then press the delete key on your keyboard a few times or as needed. It will slowly soften the erase around the soldier.




Now if you really want to make it look good, apply the above process by using the lasso tool around the barrel flare, obviously using a new layer as well.

Nice pez!