Clipping Mask problem

Hi Hoogleman.

Many thanks for you help, and for doing this before you went to bed :-) but unfortunately, it's still not what I'm trying to do.

You can see how the highlight becomes much more dynamic when it has a clipping mask applied (appears darker, and more textured). I want to save that darker, more textured highlight layer.

I don´t think I understand what you are asking, but I looked at your PSD and it looks to me like the highlight you want to save is a layer effect? Is that what you mean? Can´t you just save it as a layer style so that you can apply it to whatever you want next time? I could very well have misunderstood what you mean though, I just woke up lol :)

Ok I may be getting confused here that layer is exactly the it is a semi transparant hence the highlight effect hence the fact it will be mnore dynamic against a dark background look at it when you enable the plain black layer i put in you still pretty much get the recor there as the it is masked into that shape. If you have a white background below the layer it will not hardly show up.

If you want to keep just the highlights, then unclip it from the record and copy it by itself. As Hoogle said, it doesn't show up unless it has a dark or colored BG, but you can do wantever you want once it's in a separate doc. If you want to preserve the record with the highlights, why not just merge those two and copy. Sometimes flattening the image preserves the results better. IDK why that is; maybe something I do wrong. In any event after you flatten or whatever and "save as" you can just go back and undo the alteration to the psd and restore it to its former state. And if you want to mess around and experiment some more, make a copy of the psd and keep your original safe.

Hope this helps, but it's hard to understand what you want as you can see with a number of us going, "huh?"

here's the highlight layer with a separate BG layer like you have. Looks different a bit but BG colors and opacities a bit different.
:idea:

OK, so I just went back to your original question, and it looks like I still haven't gotten it right, though I still don't know what you want. Why not just clip the layer again to whatever you want just like you do in the record doc? And if you want just the circular effect . . . ctl click the thumbnail of the record, unclip the hlighlight area and apply a mask or invert and delte. Then you can copy it. You'll have to apply the mask (as said above by Hoogle) to make it a png.

Now I give up, lol. May a more guruish guru than I come to your aid.