Okay,

I've got a picture of a person and I want to edit it so it has a white background. I spent about an hour in PSP using the paintbrush (size 1 and 2) going around the countour of the face and then whitening the surrounding areas, at the end of all it looks rough, non-aliased and basically crap. Whats the best way of doing this (i.e. removing background).

send me the photo and I will take a wack at it for you

lasso tool

Does PSP have one of those? The best way to cut something out of it's background it to get in close (800x or so) then cut bits off the sides with the lasso tool. Erm, in photoshop that's exactly what it looks like - a small lasso.

It should provide just enough fading on the edge to prevent that rough 'chunky' look.

The other way is using a mask, but I doubt PSP uses them (though I may be wrong.)

Greg Moore

go around the edges with the smudge tool to give it an aliased look.. just don't go overboard ;)
set size to about 7 (depending on the size of the image)
hardness to 0
opacity to about 50
density to 100
and step to 1