Photo refresher

[bwood]

I have not used brushes and photo cropping to be really good at this. I have a jpeg of a well defined person in front of background that is awful. I want to crop and cut the person out, or fill up a brush with a different color and make a nice long header. Back in my Macromedia days I would have used a magic lasso.
I need a step by step on this one. Thanks everyone for suggestions. I’ve included the picture. Apologies for the background.