Thu Jan 19, 2006 8:22 am Reply with quote
if you use the pen, once you're done with you cutout shape, press ctrl+enter, this will select your shape. Click on the layer where you wanna make the cutout in the layers palette, then click on the icon of a rectangle with a circle within, located in the layer's palette footer. Now you should have your layer "cutout", more precisely it's masked. On your layer in the layers palette, on the right of the small preview it should have appeared a chain symbol and a black/white thumbnail. That's your mask, you mask objects with 100% black and reveal them with 100% white, any shade of gray in the black/white spectrum will give you a different opacity for that mask. Now that your item is masked, you can work on the mask if the contours of it seem too hard, by clicking on the b/w thumbnail in the layers palette, start blurring the edges of your mask with the blur tool, see what happens. experiment.