how do you gradient/fade pictures? like in here marges hair starts fading and i saw another flower picture that starts fading/gradient towards the bottom

maybe he selected the hair and then like but a gradient over it ?
maybe you should pm chris xglovex im pretty sure he`ll be willing to tell you exactly what he did

Same thing you do when you're blending... Isn't it?
Matte... I think it's called the mask tool? Something like this tutorial.
[ http://www.createblog.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22774 ]

^ It's not that hard..

You can just use like a big circle eraser tool (probably about 100-300 pixels) and click it where the hair is.

Anything larger than 19 has feathered edges... I never thought about using the eraser tool... o.O Even though I spend a lot of time extracting images. Wow, I'm an idiot. XD