OK, so let's say I take a portrait of someone and want to effectively cut them out and place them on a different background using layers. How do you accomplish that when it comes to hair?

Ted
www.bozarthphotographic.com

depending on the version of photoshop you have your options are going to be the magic wand tool, the quick select tool, the pen tool, or one of the several variants of the lasso tool.

Cutting out hair is one of the more complicated things to do in Photoshop. There's many different ways to do it and how you do it depends on the background. There are plug-ins like Mask Pro that are supposed to do the cutting out for you but might not always work as well as doing it by hand. Without a plug-in, here's a link to a tutorial that shows two different ways. Professional photoshopers will take it even further and literally zoom in to the pixel level to get the hair selection perfect.

Good info - thank you!

depending on the version of photoshop you have your options are going to be the magic wand tool, the quick select tool, the pen tool, or one of the several variants of the lasso tool.

I like to select by color.