We are going to use the "magic wand" selection tool and the transparent brush for this lesson. If you have a graphic/photo that you want to cut a solid or semi-solid background off of, this is how you would do it.
I started with this picture

You go to your toolbar and click on the little wand icon

When you do, your cursor will look like this

Click anywhere in the area color you want to delete. This works great with a solid color! But you will have to do some work if your background isn't one color. Because once you click on it you will see this

The green arrow above shows the "marching ants" that are telling you that you actually have more than one color...in this case the background is faded colors of purple. To get the rest of the color you want gone, you will now go to your keyboard and find your SHIFT key, usually to your left and near the bottom. Hold this key down and then click on more areas of the background, to include them in the selected area.

You can click as much as you want. You can also zoom in to see the spots you need to click on. You can use the zoom bar at the top

or if your mouse/trackerball has a wheel, you can use that to zoom (well mine does anyways!).

You just keep clicking, until you get all the areas selected. Also be sure to look for small areas that weren't selected, like this

When you are done, it sill look like this, all this purple is selected

Now go to the top and go to EDIT/DELETE or right click on the area and choose delete to delete the area

Now you will need to "clean" up around your cutout. Incase there are some areas that you didn't actually get. You will go and click for your normal cursor

Now we will use the Trasnparent Brush...or the eraser tool is what I call it! You will go to EFFECTS/TRASNPARENTCY/TRASNPARENT BRUSH

You will see this to the left.

I find that the default settings are not to my liking, so I ALWAYS change these settings to the following

Again you will need to zoom in very close, and set the size of your tool to a small setting, what ever you feel good about using is fine. If you have something that is more of a clipart instead of photo, the smallest brush size will actually let you delete a pixel at a time and this really comes in handy. Now you will get as close as you can and click to delete any unwanted areas. If you look very close and see that your picture looks like a bunch of little squares when it is zoomed in on, that is what a "pixel" is, its a little square of each color that is used in shading of a picture.

The red arrow is the eraser tool icon and the green arrow shows where I deleted some area of light purple

Once you have gone all the way around your cutout, you can then click done and it should look much better and neater

And it's now ready to be used!

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