Making the BG solid white is easy; just select the lower left corner, as much as you can of the BG, with the rectangular marquee tool. Then go to "Select/select similar" and you'll have virtually all of the BG. You may also have some small spots in the subject that got selected too. Magnify the image, scroll around it, and use the marquee tool with the cntrl key held down to surround those areas and deselect them. Set the feathering on the selction at a couple pixels, invert it, and save the selection. All this can be done in the "select" menu.
Now you have a selection, and a number of options. You can load the selection and copy it, then open a new document with a white background and paste the selection in that. You can load the selection, invert it, and use hue/saturation, levels, curves, or brightness/contrast to brighten the BG up to pure white. Or you can just delete background by laoding the inverted selectiona nd hitting "delete"; this will leave showing whatever color the canvas is under the picture.
For your "suburban" BG, you can find the image youw ant to use, open it, and paste the mailbox in. Or you can use the original image, copy the BG layer, then open the new, suburban BG in a new window, copy that, and paste it into the original of the mailbox. Then drag the new layer in the layers pallette so it's under the duplicate BG layer, load the inverted selection and delete the BG, and the suburban scene will be revealed beneath.
However, this is a difficult thing to do realistically; all sorts of factors have to mesh for it to look natural, inluding the relative eye height of the POV and the lighting, plus the angle at which the box is shot. For example, the first of your images is a side elevation; this means you'd have to superimpose it on a shot made looking down the length of the street from the correct distance in front of the hosues at which the mailbox would be placed.
Robt.
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