Using photoshop for non-square button art

I was wondering what options people have used for making non-square clickable movies or buttons for flash in photoshop? Has anyone had much success with this? Or do you turn everything into vector art?

My square buttons for menus and backgrounds are all drawn in photoshop but now I need other shaped things and am considering my options. Let me know if anyone has any interesting ways of doing this. Otherwise I guess I’ll just draw stuff in photoshop and then “trace bitmap” in flash to vectorize it and delete the background white parts.

You could save your image in a format that supports alpha, png for example. The drawback of that is you won’t have accurate hitTesting (though for a button you won’t be hitTesting the image itself anyway). It would drive up the file size a little more as well.

Thanks for the advice. If I did that and clicked on the layer that had alpha = 0 would it still register as being clicked? I don’t want it to.

If you’re using it for buttons you can just have the image sitting on the up/over/down frames and draw your hit frame in the shape you want it as a simple vector shape.

But for shapeflag hitTests, or if you were leaving the image as the hit state for the button, clicking on the alpha part of it would still count as a hit.

You rock man, I never knew what that “hit” frame did and didn’t think to look it up. I’ve just been using the up, over, and down frames and ignored that for some reason.

Wow, I’m still such a flash noob =). Thanks to everyone who’s been answering all my noobish flash questions!