Discover the Background Eraser Tool for Photoshop CS

Here is a demonstration of the background eraser tool. This tutorial will also morph into how to use it to get a selection.

First duplicate the background layer by dragging it to the new layer icon.

This is by no means my favorite way of getting a selection but the tool itself can come in handy in particular circumstances (such as touching up a finished selection/layer that has pixels left between frizzy long hair).

Get the tool and you can right click or use the options bar or brush palette to choose an eraser brush size. In most cases you’ll want a large one.

To erase the background simply move the background eraser around.

It is the crosshairs in the middle that determine the point of what is going to be erased of everything that is within the circle of the brush. What is actually erased and to what degree is determined by the tolerance % level.

In this case of varying greens on the grass I’m probably going to have to adjust the tolerance a bit. It’s best to use a regular eraser for vast expanses of background that need to be erased and use the background eraser when you want to erase close to your foreground subject that hopefully has a distinct color difference than the background (once again tolerance comes into play).

A higher tolerance will erase pixels that are more and more different in color range from the original (or continuous) sample point of the crosshairs (see the sampling menu).

If you really want to learn everything you can about using Photoshop, you owe yourself to take a look at the TutorialKey video tutorials training for Adobe Photoshop CS/CS2.

The difference between contiguous and discontiguous is really quite simple. Contiguous will erase everything that is within the color range closest to the crosshairs. If there is something in the way (such as a braid of hair) that breaks up the flow of the closest color range, it won’t reach beyond to erase it (even if it is within the reach of the brush). For example here you see that contiguous isn’t getting that patch of green on the other side of her.

When you turn on ‘discontiguous’ (I hate typing that)...

...the eraser will basically jump across the vastly different outside-the-color-range-braid-of-hair over to erase the within-range-color of the patch of grass. Try it out for yourself.

Keep using the magic eraser to go around the outskirts of the subject. It’s ok to overlap of course for example with his reddish black hair because it’s not in the sampling color range and tolerance of the crosshairs.

Here’s a spot for a regular eraser which you can use later because the erasing is leaving particles and it is getting too choppy. Remember that you have a lot of tools at your disposal to edit images with. It’s important to understand them ALL.

Here’s another example of discontiguous in action. Note how it jumps beyond off color range of the picnic basket to get to the in-color sampling range of the grass inside the handle.

Here’s a result of using the background eraser tool. It’s pretty accurate for creating a clearly defined foreground object as long as you have a distinct background that separates them. When color ranges are too close together then you get a lot of spilling over and it gets ugly and even tolerance might not save you.

To take it further..I don’t use this method anymore..but you could now make an official selection of your work. Grab the Lasso tool (L) and draw a loose selection all the way around the subject.

Now switch to the moVe tool and nudge up once and then down once with your arrow keys on the keyboard. This will close the selection in around the subject.

Now you can do such things as make a new background layer by creating a new layer and then filling it with a color of your choice using any of my taught methods. To fill an entire layer you’ll want to Select: Deselect (Ctrl/Cmd D)

the selection and then fill otherwise you’ll fill the selected area on a new layer. Make sure that layer is beneath the foreground layer in the layers palette.

Grab a large regular eraser and just clean up the spots or pixel dust that is left behind on the layer of your foreground subject.

Change the color if you want to, swipe a gradient, pull in a different background image with the moVe tool, add some text, etc. and you’re ready for print.

In this case I want you to know I didn’t spend the time cleaning up the rest of the foreground layer. Hopefully the designer in you is cringing and thinking what is that ugly red background doing with this nice family?...good you’re thinking. (I was in a hurry making 60 of these tutorials in a few days) Now pull in a background picture that would work nice in my other tutorials. I would also recommend a background if you want to keep any grass that would complement the foreground layer and which you could do some ‘radial gradient layer masking’ to get a perfect blend (zhooommmm).

Yes this technique is taught in the TutorialKey training program in-depth. I just can’t give away all the secrets yet can I? The more I look at this photo the more I wonder what I was thinking. But hopefully you learned the background eraser tool and much more in this tutorial. If you have any concerns about the quality of my portfolio or design skills please check out the iPSDirectory immediately or my design tutorials on PhotoshopDesign.NET.