Have fun with this one!

[SteveDallas]

And I found one, sort of... I checked out "Adobe Photoshop Elements" by Philip Andrews from the library. I haven't been through the whole, but so far looks very helpful. (It's in color, which helps. Who wants a book on photo editing with nothing but grayscale images?)

Anyway, the last chapter talks about some features Photoshop has that Elements does not:

CMYK color separation for offset printing
Bundled with Adobe ImageReady (make rollover buttons and image maps)
Color management controls
Record a series of actions
Save a selection as part of the file & use it later (you can somewhat work around this in elements by cutting your selection into a new layer)
Pen (allows path drawing .. sounds like the magnetic lasso, but more sophisticated)
Masking (block part of picture from having something applied to it.. again I think you could kludge around this with layers)
Curves (fine control of shadows & highlights)
Individual balance adjustment of color channels

I would like to have the pen--what I've discovered so far is that the most time-consuming, tricky part is selecting an irregular area with a good degree of accuracy, and any tool that can help that would be welcome. Everything else, I think they're accurate when they say it's only something a serious professional would need.

Now I need to figure out how to attach heads to bodies and I'll really be in business!!!