THE TRICK TO TRICKY EXTRACTIONS

Adobe's own Julieanne Kost (Photoshop guru and instructor supreme) showed this last year at the PhotoshopWorld Conference & Expo (before Photoshop CS was announced), and it had everybody's jaw dropping, but little has been said of it since, even though it's built into Photoshop CS's Extract function (found under the Filter menu). It's called Textured Image and you use it when you're dealing with a tough extractiona person with a dark shirt posing on a dark background, for exampleand Extract can't really tell where the shirt ends and the background begins. Turning this on helps detect the edges by examining the texture, and if it detects a texture (like you might find in a shirt), it can often help pull you out of a tight situation.