Cleaning edges around an object

I know this is probably a textbook question but I cant afford any books. Not in the manual either.
The image I am talking about is @ http://members.home.net/rtbnj/santahat.htm
Upon making the selection, using threshold, i realised there was a distinct edge of white and shadow around the image which was there in the original since I got it off the web. I need to clean it up completely in order to make the selection work for me.
I've tried an eraser for an hour but its just to damn delicate of work.

I appreciate your help,

Ryan
[email]rtbnj@home.com[/email]

Ryan....

Sometimes the most obvious answer is the best. I grabbed your hat, opened it in Photoshop, changed the mode to RGB, magic wand (default settings) to select the white around it, went to selective color, chose "Whites" and pulled the remaining 2% of black in the BG out, then used a small hard-edge paintbrush as the eraser, and finished cleaning it up...zoomed in to 300%.

Total time, about 7 minutes. I dug into the edge of the hat a wee tiny bit, and the job isn't absolutely perfect...but the eraser was the perfect tool for the job.

Don't discount the obvious.

edit: sorry when i posted this for some reason i didn't see utopian's post :D listen to him :D

you if you just zoom in it shouldn't be that hard with an eraser...thats how i would do it. magic wand won't work here you've already tried hreshold, isn't there a way with masking or somethin? not sure, maybe someone else will have some ideas, sorry.

eraser looks like it'll come out the best tho.

My selection is better now. Just cant get the black egdes out as well as you did in your great work. Images>selective color>whites doesnt seem to do anything for the black, as far as I know how.
Please explain how you did such a great job.

Ryan

Knocking a picture out of a background, especially as weird as that one, I'd probably use a "layer mask" to be able to hide/reveal the parts of the pic I wanted to keep. This is good because you don't have to go back into your history if you mess up, the graphic is still there, but invisible if you want to correct a mistake. After you're done, you simply apply the mask, and the transparent pixels that you cut out, are removed.

But for this to work, the layer you're working on can't be a background layer, you either have to duplicate the layer, or double click it and make it "layer 0" if its flattened down as the background.