Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Digital Imaging Concepts and Techniques

Photoshop offers three kinds of Eraser tools to complement your drawing tools. While these tools have a purpose, you should quickly move beyond them as they often produce crude edges in the erased area that lower the quality of your project.

The three options are

• Eraser tool: This tool will delete pixels as you drag over them. On a layer they are replaced with transparency. On a Background, the pixels are replaced with your background color. To use, just drag through the area you want to erase.

• Background Eraser tool: This tool is designed to help erase the background from an image. The difference between foreground and background in the image must be very clear and high contrast. This tool is significantly less flexible than the technique of layer masking, which we'll cover in Chapter 7, "Layer Masking."

• Magic Eraser tool: This tool is most similar to the Paint Bucket tool in that it attempts to select and modify similar pixels under your click point. Instead of filling those pixels with a color, however, the Magic Eraser tool deletes them.

From years of personal experience, I strongly suggest avoiding the Eraser tools. These three tools are relatively primitive in their approach to selecting pixels for deletion. Additionally, the erasers are permanentthe discarded pixels are gone for good. It bears repeating: If you have anything beyond a basic image that you need to extract from its background, the answer is layer masking, which will be covered in depth in Chapter 7.