How many times have you found the perfect background (pattern- and texture-wise) but it's the wrong color? It's easily changed. There are probably several ways to achieve the same result, but I use the Adjust Hue and Saturation. I have several photos here, but it's really only two or three steps.

Go ahead and add your photograph to your chosen background. I love this paper by Stacey Stehley, and it sort of matches, but I want the focus to be on the child, not the floral arrangments.

Use your color picker tool to select a color from your photo, which you would like the background to match. I chose her pants:

Note the Hue (H) and Saturation (S) on the palette. I don't worry about the RGB values. Now click back to your background layer, and then go to Adjust, Hue and Saturation, Colorize. I'm using PSP8 but it should be similar in all of them.

In the little box that pops up put your Hue and Saturation values and click okay. In some cases this is all you need to do. In my case here it's not quite right:

I need to go to Adjust again, and choose Hue and Saturation, Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Here you can move the slider Lightness scale to get to your target. I adjusted the saturation a bit, too, in my case.

When it looks right, click OK and you have your background that matches so much better. Now the focus is on the child:

And the finished layout, using the flower from Stacey's kit as well, and some of Tina's word art:

Click Here for a printable copy of this tutorial.