Speaking of extractions.... I don't think I do extractions the right way, I just use various iterations of the eraser tools. But one thing I do which tricks the eye, I crop off bits that are messy and add them back in later, and run filters over them to throw the eye off any imperfections. For instance, in Goofy's Kitchen... see the perfectly clean round logo at the top?
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Here's what I did....
1. I found a photo online taken looking straight on - that ensures the circle shape is a real circle not skewed. it may have been this one...
http://www.mouseplanet.info/gallery/d/136286-1/DLH-GoofysKitchen-112711-AVP.jpg, definitely similar to that one.
2. I just used the select ellipse tool (you can hold down shift while selecting to get a perfect circle) to select the logo and part of the surrounding blue-ish dishthing. I didn't bother about the dark blue edge because extracting circles neatly is hard

All I wanted was the logo within a proper circle. I tidied up the overlapping foliage by using the clone tool - neater to do this while your elipse is selected.
3. Then, once I had that part nice and circle-y on a new layer I added a blue stroke to to it to make it look like the original pic again.
4. I then added a standard "bevel & emboss" to make it look shiny and 3-d. Then I added a shadow. Et voila... a very quick extraction without any of the pain or jaggedy edges!
Was that helpful? Possibly not

But it can be a much easier way to extract things rather than actually extracting them.
Filters are your friend...
The texturizer filter, which adds a canvas/sandstone effect can be used very effectively to add character to an otherwise very poor quality image like in this lion king card... Picking up the colours from the logo and using them in the card makes it look like the faded quality of the colours from top to bottom on the logo was intentional rather than the best of a bad bunch!
*********** please see my new thread for cards
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'Ohana was a terrible logo to work with, very few distinct copies of it online, so I heavily filtered it to render it with an almost drawn or painted look. The easist way to do something like this is to create a duplicate layer, then filter->select edges, then change the blend mode on that layer to allow the original to shine through (playwith differnt blend modes here). Easy but effective! I then picked out the designs on it and followed them all around the card, overwhelming the eye to create an overall effect
*********** please see my new thread for cards
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Smoke and mirrors... our cards are made to be printed 3x4inches.... we can work with this to our advantage doing things that might look a bit silly or overdone at bigger sizes!
Again possibly not helpful... just thought I'd share the tricks I've learned along the way! Dinner boiling over... bye for now
