ps6 beginner seeking answers

Id like to start using photoshop. I'm reading the ps5 book and cant put a thing together. I'd like to start off with learning how to correctly slect a peice of an image, remove an unwanted piece of a image, and save a selection as a file. I have tried to read the tutorials but have no luck after hours of trying.
Id like some real help just getting started in these areas.
I made it through 4 years of computer science but cant learn even one of these photoshop technique within 3 days.
The ONLY success I've had is using extract in PS6 but that can get messy!

If you give a link to the image you're trying to make a selection of I can probably explain it more easily. There are many, many ways of making a selection in photoshop. Looking at your image will help us pick the right technique.

Well, if you are wanting to create a selection and remove the rest, you can try using the lasso tool (or variations of each, adding to the selection by holding shift while selecting the second/third/fourth/etc time), go to the select menu, invert selection, press delete. Or, you can make the selection, copy it, Ctrl+N (this creates a new document to the size of the selection), paste, save.

Hope that helps.

Haha, I agree. Extraction is a pain in the arse, but very time saving too.

After reading I realize that there are many ways to select.

The images i selected are @
members.home.net/rtbnj/selections.htm

the football picture has like colors in it.
the next picture has defined edges. Using the magnetic lasso tool, even when changing the pixel width and edge contrast, leaves rough edges (trying the feather action only deselects parts of the selection!@#) and clips pixels especially around the hair. What if hair was blowing in the wind? I'd rather not use extract!
The last image is obviously the type I will be working with considering I have 2 dogs i like to photograph. Thir fur is long like hair and can get crazy in the wind. I tried implementing the mask technique to no avail. This is the method Id like to use since extraction requires patience. For instance in photoshop 5 book a mask is used to to make a selection of a girl with stringy hair. First a color channel is selected and copied, then use high pass, next adjust the levels, use the lasso and eraser to remove the interior of the selection, finally drop it to a different image. i got as far as copying the channel and almost correctly using the high pass filter. Correct me if Im wrong, but this will only work on an image that has a uniform and "contrasty" background.
So many ways..... but what do I know? I need to put some techniques together that i can use as a rule of thumb for the different types of images I need to select from.
So many ways, so much time, but what do I know?

What if hair was blowing in the wind? I'd rather not use extract!

Extract has different sized brushes/erasers/etc .. so for those small detailings, the smaller brushes would be fine. I'd say if you really care about what you're creating it's well worth the time and effort put into it.

Got the images, I’ll take them from easiest to hardest:

The Swimsuit Model
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She’s a snap, like you said use a lasso tool and play around with the settings. If you’re getting “jaggies” (jagged edges) it’s mostly caused by you having too small a picture. If you worked for a production house the you would have access to that photo at a very high resolution (at least 1600x1280). You would use the lasso on the large photo then shrink it to the size you wanted. No problem. However, the best way it to use the pen tool to make a path and then make a selection out of that path. I call this path tracing and it’s my defacto method of doing photo cropping.

The Dog.
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Ack – Hair. Same advice on the large photo above, but the main thing is to shoot the dog on a decent background so you can get each hair but not have the color of the background come through. Not easy. This is one of the rare cases where path tracing is prohibitively difficult.

The Football player
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Your Lasso is mostly useless as the image is so small and there are overlaps of the same colors on different objects (like on the right side of his neck where the audience is blended in). However, path tracing is your best friend! I’m assuming you’re not familiar with using paths so you’d need to get past that hurdle first. I’ll warn you, it’s quite tricky to learn (at least it was for me). I use a wacom pen tablet mostly because I work with paths a lot. The beauty of a path trace is you decide what the selection is. Photoshop is great, but backgrounds or odd lighting can fool the algorithms it uses. Humans are far better and understanding where boundaries are on images. It took me about 5 minutes to do a path trace on you football photo (as it was small) and I made the transparent gif below from the selection I created. Also, here is the PSD file that contains the path I made: