This tutorial will get you more involved with the brush tool, options and the brush palette. To bring up the brushes palette you can toggle the window here in the upper right corner of the options bar (when you are on a brush tool)...
This is an important tutorial because it is introducing you to the quick mask. The Photoshop quick mask is a powerful way to get great selections accurately and it's very flexible. First start off with the lasso tool and make a very loose selection around an object...
Start with any image you like. I'm going to introduce you to another very powerful feature of Photoshop; it's called an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers give you the flexibility and power to make powerful, dramatic improvements to your images WITHOUT altering any pixels...
Go ahead and select the rectangular marquee tool. Just click and drag to form a rectangular selection. Here I'm generally covering the area of this window. When you are the default marquee tool; new selection, you can move the marquee itself around the entire document...
The first thing you should do when altering any pixels is make a duplicate of the layer you want to screw around with. Just drag it to the new layer icon as shown...
It's fairly easy to record your own action. To start off, go to the actions palette now click on the folder icon. This will create your own set. Give it a name in the pop up window. Now you can press the New Action icon. Enter a name for your new action...
Actions aren't as complicated as they might seem. All they are is a set of commands or actions that you can record or �run'. If you go to the actions palette you can see that there are different default action sets that you can load (production, image effects, etc.)...
There are plenty of filters that come with Photoshop naturally. In the Photoshop CS (8) there is now a filter gallery. This larger-than-life dialog box allows you to use filters a little bit like layers. This is covered in depth on the Discover Photoshop: CS Features CD...
To take the magic wand tool a little further and getting a more complicated selection check this tutorial out. If you have an image with frizzy hair this can cause difficulties. You can use the magic eraser to get rid of a simple background...