[Lee Chabowski]

I realize this is an ancient thread, but for anyone who’s experiencing the same issue, take a look at this before you ditch your preferences, or some other extreme measure. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why suddenly my pen tool would only create a shape and not a mask, when I had used it successfully a million times before. I finally realized that I had shortened the length of my layer so that it wouldn’t be visible until a certain point on the timeline. The layer underneath contained the same image, so I didn’t realize that my playhead was sitting earlier in the timeline than the point where my active layer came in. So the tool didn’t recognize that there was a layer to add a mask to. When I finally realized that the playhead needed to be moved, I moved it to where my active layer was visible, and then the pen tool successfully created a mask. Whew!