Sean Haffey wrote:
> My wife
> has ordered me Richard Lynch's "Hidden power of PE2" for Fathers'
> Day but that 5 weeks away!

I hear it's a pretty good book.

> What I want to do is take a photo of a person with wispy hair and
> get rid of the background. If anyone can give me a hint of how to
> start, I'll do the hard work.

If you can control the background when taking the image, you are going to have a far easier time of it. Nothing really works like magic (even the extract tool). However, if you can confine the background to a specific color (or range) you'll be able to knock it out pretty handily using my tools.

Considering it's 5 weeks off...You might want to try some manual masking (which quite honestly is often what I do).

Try this:
1. open the image you want to use
2. flatten (if it isn't already)
3. dupicate the background and rename it Source
4. select the whole image
5. Press D to reset to default color
6. Activate the background layer by clicking it in the Layers palette
7. Press backspace to clear to white (you won't see it on screen)
8. Create a new layer. It will be between the background and Source layers. Name it Mask.
9. Activate the Source layer.
10. Duplicate the Source layer and rename it Hint.
11. Change the opacity of the Hint layer to about 50%.
12. Activate the Source layer again.
13. Press Cmd/CTRL+G (mac/PC). This will group the Source and Mask layers. The image will appear at 50%.
14. Choose the paintbrush and a small, round, 50% hard brush (you may need to adjust the settings).
15. Activate the Mask layer, and paint in the areas you want solid.
16. Preview the result by toggling the view for the Hint layer.

If you see what I've tried to have you set up here, you are using the original information as a template to help create a manual mask.

There are a lot of variations and things you can do to speed this up, like using the Magic Wand to select areas outside the hair and then fill an inverted selection, using the polygon lasso to select larger areas, or using the Bucket tool to fill areas (in most cases, use Contiguous, All Layers, Antialias, and a tolerance of 20-50).

Of course, there is always setting this up using Layer Masks (which you can get with the free tools from my website: http://hiddenelements.com ), and when you have the tools from the book, look into using Blend Mask, Saturation Masking, and other selection and masking techniques I include there.

Hope that helps!

PS - I have considered addingthe Extract tool to Elements, but really never use it myself.

--
Richard Lynch
author, The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0782141781/newwriting/