Lasso problems, please help

[Aishaa]

I just spent over an hour contouring a lasso around a figure, and an error occurred in photopaint, and I lost all the work.
How do I prevent this because when I press CTRL+S the program sez it cannot save masks.....

Also I want to know how to really work this lasso thing, because when I start lassoing, halfway up the figure the thing decides to cut itself off, and I can't continue lassoing - in other words I have to CTRL Z everything and start over.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[khallman]

First, you can save the current mask with a document as long as the file format supports such information. For most working files you should use the native CPT format because it preserves all the relevant information with the file. If you are working with a CPT format file doing a ctrl-S or Save will save the mask too.

You can also save the mask itself by using Mask -> Save. You can save the mask as a channel within the current document (to later be recalled with Mask -> Load) or you can save the mask to disk. If you save the mask as a channel, again, the file format must support such information or it may be lost once the document is saved.

Note: When you save masks to disk, they are saved in a greyscale format (i.e. the levels from white to black indicate the opacity of that section of the mask). So, you could use the load mask from disk with a greyscale image for interesting masks... or at least that is something to experiment with.