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This is the series where we show you simple, but effective tips, tutorials, and tricks related to designer tools. Today we show you how to take advantage of background eraser in Photoshop. This tool is often overlooked, but it can really do wonders sometimes. We are sure that many of already spent hours on making perfect selections in order to separate background and objects of interest in different photos. Next time, you might use this tool.
Of course, there are some limitations when using background eraser. That means that if your background is very colorful, then you might need to go back to making selections. In other words, your objects need to have different border colors than the background, or you might end up erasing them also. Let us use the background eraser on one of our photos.
Step 1 – Open up the photo in Photoshop
This time we used a photo showing clouds on a blue sky. You already can see that if we wanted to change that blue background color, we might be in trouble trying to make a perfect selection around the clouds. But, with background eraser, we can concentrate on erasing the blue color, and our clouds should stay where they are. For the sake of this example, we also made a new background layer, so we can see what is being erased, and what is being preserved.
Step 1 - Open up the photo in Photoshop
Step 2 – Select background eraser tool and start erasing on the Clouds layer
Well, not quite. First we need to make some adjustments to the tool. We used the settings from the picture below, but what is important is to select the appropriate brush, set sampling to once, set limits to Discontiguous, leave tolerance to 50%, and leave the Protect Foreground Color checkbox marked. And one more thing. You need to use the Eyedropper Tool in order to select the Foreground color you want to preserve. In our case, we just sampled a piece of the cloud which was a little darker than white.
Step 2 - Select background eraser tool and start erasing on the Clouds layer
Step 3 – Continue to erase
Step 3 - Continue to erase
Step 4 – Done
Unless you want to do something more with the photo. We just changed the color for the background layer in order to make another example of red sky.
Step 4 - Done
Step 4 - Another example with red sky
There you have it. One more quick tool tip is over. Have fun and let us know how it goes.
