Photoshop and cutouts

It's true, Doc. That's why it's a good thing I have that "clipping" function in the pagination system.

 

I saw some video tutorial on the new cs 3 version of photoshop ... it's got some magic tool that senses what you want to cut out ... looks like it's going to be super easy.

 

Off topic, but anyway: Microsoft Picture It is great (and cheap) when it comes to doing cutouts. Much, much simpler than PhotoShop in my opinion. Of course, this doesn't help our many Mac users.

 

Yeah, we use Macs.

 

Why do people think it's hard to do cutouts in PhotoShop? It's not. It's unbelievably easy.

Besides, how does Picture It interact with Quark or InDesign?

 

I've always used the pen tool, but lately I've been tinkering with inversing the path and deleting all of the background. It puts the cut-out image on a transparent background and makes it easier to see and spots that were missed. You can also create the drop shadow in the image because it makes a blank layer for the background. The only problem is it has to be saved as a psd docment, and not all systems recognize them.

 

Has anyone ever seen a video series that demos some of this? I'm not sure I follow the info on this thread very well at all, because several of the tools (lasso for example) I have never used.