Removing Render backgrounds

I know this is a really noobish question haha but I've always used the wand tool but when the background of a render is black and there's a lot of black in the render its self it becomes really hard to cut it out without it wanting to remove some of the render too. What other methods of cutting renders out are there?

And I'm not talking about generally cutting a render, I'm talking about getting it ready for using after somebody has already cut it.


For those of you that have no clue what I'm on about here is an example. I'm trying to cut out the render so It will have a transparent background, therefor usable in a signature. When I try to use the wand tool it selects black from the render itself and not just the background. It also makes it very hard to cut the hair out too.

 

if you have FireFox, and the render is a .png, you can drag it from the website into Photoshop, with it completely rendered. Lil' photoshop trick

 

I use FireFox but I just tried to drag the image from the forums onto photoshop and It still didn't make the background transparent and left me a black background =(

 

Save the image to your desktop THEN open it in photoshop.

 

Post the source of your render. Maybe whoever cut it has no idea what they're doing.

 

Hmm. It works with some other renders but won't wont for these ones.

http://www.gamerenders.com/forum/showthread.php?t=294842

 

only works with .png and .bmp.
unfortunately so people save em as jpgs -.-
noobs everytime -.-

 

Well the picture I'm trying to use is PNG and it still doesnt work properly?

This method works with other renders but not these ones and I don't understand why?

And this is what I get when i save the picture and then open it with photoshop.

 

try making a copy on the image layer, go to Image>Adjustments >Threshold, selecting an extreme black or white part, select it, and erase it.

 

Props on that firefox trick, I didn't know that.