You may have to settle for using just a tif in the cutout opacity. It will render without crashing. I believe it does work in 2009. Hi BldRnr, Okay that would explain why I'm having so much trouble. I'll have a shot at pointing my tif to the cutout opacity and see if I can get that working. As a side question why would this not be the way to still do it now rather than go through a reverse shader and then a luminance shader?