logo stripping

This is a christmas card idea for my wife who sells volkswagens.
I shot the tree and made sure i had a good sized bulb close to the center of the frame. The bulb was gold when i shot it and my goal was to keep some of the reflections and make it look natural.
I opened the logo in a seperate window in photoshop and using the move tool dragged it onto my tree image. I used free transform, holding the shift key down to constrain the proportions, to make it fit to the size of the bulb. Also to help with this i lowered the logo layers opacity so i could see the bulb size clearly.
I then changed the logos layer mode to hue (modes are in the top left hand corner of the layers pallete). This made the two layers blend and look natural. It killed the white in the logo however so i duplicated the logo layer and changed the logo copy layers mode to normal. I selected the white in the logo, did a select inverse, and hit delete to get rid of all but the white. I then lowered the opacity of this layer to 56% so it too would blend but still remain white.
Lastly i retouched some of the distracting reflections out of the bulb and placed a vignette on the outside of the image.

selections of people on white

This photo was one of 16 or so that i wanted to strip together to make one large group photo.
I started by selecting the white background.
I used the magic wand tool with a tolerance of about 30 (lower this if the selection goes into your photo) and clicked on the background.
then hold down the shift key to add to your selection.
I get as much as possible selected with the magic wand and lasso and then fine tune any problem areas in quick mask mode (Q).
Once i am happy with the selection i select-modify-expand (2 or 3 pixels).
I then select-feather (1 pixel).
Next select-inverse.
I can then grab the person (selected) with the move tool and drag them into a new document that i have made for the group.
If you just wanted a white background in the original photo you could have just filled the background with white before the select-inverse step.
Hair, obviously, is the hard part. Thank goodness these people wore hats.