Pen tool my friend, pen tool.
When I first started using photoshop and doing a bit of digital art (About 2 months ago), the pen tool was very scary : )
Here's a tut I found:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDrtyNmp3A4
Basically, the pen tool makes things called paths. These paths are made up of anchor points and handles. When making a path, when you click it makes an anchor point. Click again and it'll make another anchor point, connected to the previous one with a path. If you click and drag, you'll be dragging the handles on the anchor point, which will curve that path.
A path itself is not a visible line of pixels that will show up if you print, but you can stroke it and fill it. They are infinitely resizeable and the quality will not degrade when you make them bigger (Look up vectors) because it resamples new pixels that will follow/fill the path.
Once you've made a path, and closed it off by clicking the original point, you can right click inside the path and choose "Make selection" to make a selection out of your path. You can then click the New layer mask button (In your layers pallette) to isolate your selection. You could then go into the layer mask to add more to your selection if you deleted too much, or take off even more simply by painting black (Hide) or white (Reveal)
You could also invert the selection then delete, but that is destructive and you are stuck with what you have instead of being able to recover parts.
My advice: Look up layer masks and learn to use them well, how they work. DO LOTS OF TUTS!!!
All this will lead up to bigger things and more skills!
I use CS3 too and it's awesome!
Linear Mode
