any hints for removing background in a digital photo

[ClintO]

I am using an old family photo as a lesson in playing around with Macromedia Fireworks.
I normally just deal with fairly regular shapes and can remove the background fairly easily, particularly becasue I try to take the photos against a background of fairly uniform colour. I usually deal with products not external scenes.
This is my first attempt at dealing with people against an exterior at Port Arthur. There is a lot of contrast and many colours and shades and I cant get a good edge.
So far I have tended to use the magic wand tool for large expanses of a single colour and then trim with the eraser tool, but it looks really crappy.
Is there a common technique that is used for doing this? Perhaps the lasso, but it would requires hundreds and hundreds of points to define the edge.

Clint

[silentC]

I would just use a block eraser tool to remove the bulk of it, then whip around the edges with an airbrush-shaped eraser. Sometimes I run the blurry finger around to smudge the edges a bit.

[Harry72]

Lasso tool... but in photoshop tho, you can hold the shift/alt keys for "add too" or "minus from" the selected area.