Hello and thanks for reading my post! I'm hoping that someone can help me out.

Although Flash is supposed to be a vector-based program, I find it noticeably lacking a pen tool with which to draw bezier curves! I'm putting in a large number of graphics which I silhouetted in Photoshop by drawing around them with the pen tool and eliminating the background. I read that Flash doesn't recognize Photoshop EPS files so I realize that that doesn't mean I have a transparent background. When I import them into Flash, I have a white area around the graphics which I need to get rid of.

My dilemma is trying to get rid of the backgrounds! There don't seem to be any Flash tools which allow me to do this easily. Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing??!! What I did was to break apart the image (and in some cases I traced the bitmap). At any rate, I have a bunch of 'pixels' which I can select and delete. I've tried using the magic wand and also the lasso to select the errant 'pixels'. But because my images are aliased, I have to manually delete every little white box that is around the edges. And then I've found that even though there doesn't appear to be any white pixels left, I still am getting an ugly white pixelated edge around some areas of the image, which no matter how deeply I cut into the original image, they stubbornly remain.

Then I tried to silhouette my images by using a mask. I drew around them with a pencil and then filled it in, but I guess because it wasn't a 'shape' (more like a collection of 'shapes'), Flash wouldn't turn it into a usable mask. I also wasn't able to get those nice, smooth rounded edges that I get when using the Bezier pen. Instead, I have a bunch of squares and circles and lines. There *must* be an easier way to do this!!! It takes me two forevers and the result is not usable anyway.

What should I do??? Is there some way of exporting the Photoshop path to Illustrator and then doing further with that? Or, can I create a solid black shape in Photoshop to import into Flash, break it apart and use that as a mask? Or would that give me those same pixelated edges?

AAAAAARGH!!! Please, help me, someone!!!!!

Thanks...............