When making a cutesy/comedy/happy poster one of the best things to do is to cut a character out of the background. There are maaaaany ways to do so, which includes (but not limited to) using the lasso tool(s). Here's another way, using the channels and the burning tool, and also the soft brush with almost 100% hardness. Take note that this only works with pictures that have solid backgrounds.

Open up this picture on Photoshop (I'm using CS5).

Look for this:

Double-click on the lock thing and when a window pops up just click okay. It should now look like this:

Now look at the Channels tab. Click the channels one by one and look for the one with the most contrast. In most cases, it would be the blue channel. Duplicate it by dragging the channel to the icon that looks like a post-it note (or you can always right click and select "Duplicate channel). It should now look like this:

With the "Blue copy" channel still selected, press go to Image>Adjustments>Levels (or CTRL+L). Slide the black arrow to the right and the white arrow a little to the left until most of our Victoria is black.

Select the Burn tool (O) and burn her face, chest and arm and hands. (Don't be mad.)

As you can see, those white spots can't be burned. So select the brush tool, set the foreground colour to black and start painting over them. Zoom in a little and make sure you paint those little white spots. If one part seems to be confusing (her fingernails in this case) click the box in the RGB channel so it is visible again (make sure it is like this):

And then paint over her nails. Then click on the eye on the RGB channel and you'll see Victoria's silhouette. It's almost done!

You can see the watermark, right? To remove that thing just paint over it with the brush tool, with the foreground colour set to white.

Zoom in on the bottom left and you can see there's a little grey shade. Just paint over it like the previous step.

Now look at the bottom of the channels tab and find the dotted circle icon and click on it. It should load a selection. Click on the "Layer 0" at the layers tab, and now it should look like so:

Invert the selection by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+I. Now click on the "Add layer mask" icon at the bottom of the layers tab. It should now look like this:

Right click on the layer mask and click "Apply layer mask". Now you're done! Here's what I've got:

It's pretty clean, don't you think?

Here are some images you can try on:

I know this is irrelevant, but I can't control my tears whenever I listen to SNSD's "Forever". T3T