Mike

This is really just to endorse your points about the pen tool. I was very wary of it until I read it up in Martin Evening's book on Photoshop for Photographers. The thing that really made it for me is that you don't have to make a great selection as you go because once you've got it roughly right you can edit it all to perfection afterwards.

I prefer to make my selection with no feathering and make an alpha channel so I can play around with it later, perhaps using Gaussian blur to blend the edges.

So many ways to do approach problems in digital imaging - that's one of the fascinations

All the best


John Rocha