Clipping paths will work, but in the case of a very complex image you might be better off putting whatever imagery that will be below your image in Pagemaker, into Photoshop… in other words build the background in Photoshop, flatten, and place a tiff or eps in PM.
You might not need a clipping path. If the image is (or can be) one bit blac and white, you can save it as such in TIF format. This file can be place into PageMaker anc colourized. The result is every black pixel is in colour, every white pixel is transparent. You won’t have the option of making some parts colour, some parts transparent, and some parts white. One bit means only two types of pixel.
If you’re iamge is grayscale or CMYK or a monotone, you will need a clipping path.
Draw you apth with the pen tool. You can start crude, then zoom in and improve the detail afterwards. You don’t need to redraw the entire image. Just trace around the image you want opaque. Everything ouside that path will not show, and everthing iside will be fully opaque.
Once you are happy with your apth, double-click on the Work Path in the Paths palette, naming it Path 1 (you can stil ledit it as much as you want later). From the Paths palette menu, choose Clipping Path, select Path 1, leave flatness blank. Save the file as a Photoshop EPS. PageMaker will recognize the clipping path in a TIF file, but not all programs are so well behaved. The industry standrad for such files is EPS (Binary).
