12-20-2005, 11:43 AM
The pen Tool allows you to create bezier curves. Honestly as a professional I almost never use the pen tool. It takes to much time unless I really need to make a very tolerant mask. I mostly use the polygon lasso tool to cut masks, with practice you cxan achieve the same result in a portion of the time. The wand tool is excellent for broad ranging color selections, use the tolerance box to manipulate its senetivity to contigous tones. Another selection tool is the color range menu, got to the top Menu bar->select->color range... This tool allows you to select multple color ranges and luminosities and adjust the fuzziness(tolerance) to slect only what you need. Also when you make a selection you can save it as an alpha Channel. Alpha Channels allow you to not only save your selection but add or subtract from it and clean it up.