Newbie needs Photoshop help...

I'm trying to make a sig with Dead or Alive 3 characters. I find some really nice pics of them but I cant take them out of the larger picture. Can someone help with this.

Can you explain how you would do it, and if possible let me see an example of your finished product?



That's the pic. I just want the girl, but I always seem to get the surroundings in with my selected parts. I've only tried the magnetic lasso and some Magic Wand with it. Are there any other ways?

Thanks

On behalf of myself and every other visitor to this forum who really doesn't like so much screen real estate hogged up with big sig images, I proffer this deal:

We'll tell you how to do it if you will agree to reduce the size of your sig image to about 30% of its present size.

Ok, I changed the size. Sorry about that. Any hints about my problem?

Thanks

First off, I gotta say thanks for you compliance regarding the sig image size...and without any hassle to boot! That's uncommon and very refreshing. We old hands at this forum business generally value the information much more than large examples of what a visitor is able to do attached to every post they make.

Now then...Graphicssoft at About.com has lots of tutorials for Photoshop and other CG applications. THIS ONE will teach you how to extract fireworks from one background and drop them into another using Channel Masking. If you can master this technique you should be good to go on almost any image. It might take you some practice to get the hang of it, but I assure you that mastery of Channel Operations (or CHOPs, for short) is considered by all Photoshop experts to be one of the biggest guns in their image manipulation arsenal.

Bookmark these, as well:
Channels/Masking
http://www.arraich.com/ps6_tips_channels1.htm
http://www.zdjournals.com/ips/9811/ips98b1.htm
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/Tips/9807/106.html
http://macworld.zdnet.com/1998/02/create/4139.html
http://macworld.zdnet.com/1999/06/create/graphics1.html
http://ii.pmf.ukim.edu.mk/mcp/photoshop5/chapters/1-56205-723-5/ch01/ch01.htm

Thanks