Out Damned Spot! (Photoshop Question(s))

Henroid

I'm dinking around in photoshop right now, as usual, and was wondering if there was a way to use the eraser tool to remove just a certain color (or range thereof) from an image. I'm using version 7, in case menu options and such become a problem due to me not upgrading all these years. :P

Szechuanosaurus

It's an interesting question. I'm sure this used to be a feature of the eraser tool back when I was in college (ten years ago) but seems to be a feature that has been deprecated from Photoshop for some time now.

I guess the alternative is to use Select > Colour Range...

Hahnsoo1

Yeah, just Select the Color Range. This will create boundaries around the portions that you want to erase, then just wipe the eraser over the desired sections. Should be simple enough.

Szechuanosaurus

Oh, hang on. You can do it with Background Eraser

Select the Eraser tool and change it to Background Eraser.

Change the sampling to 'Once'

Now, when you click with a specific colour in the centre target of the brush, it will select this colour for removal. Keep the mouse button depressed and start erasing. It will only erase the colour originally 'sampled' when you first depressed the button.

Henroid

Okay yeah, it was way easier than I thought. I'd say "case closed, lock thread" but I'm sure I'm gonna have more questions (or maybe other people?).

Edit - Holy crap, Szech, you're my damn hero.

Szechuanosaurus

Aren't I just?

I think the tolerance value may affect how 'similar' the colours being erased have to be to the original colour sampled. Either that or it'll affect how many individual pixels around the target get sampled for inclusion in the eraser's pallet of colours to target for erasal...erasion...erosion?

Further experimentation is necessary!

Szechuanosaurus

Yeah, based on five minutes playing around with the Background Eraser in Difference cloud fills and Noise fills it looks like the tolerance affects how similar a colour needs to be to the original pixel sampled, rather than proximity of neighbouring pixels to the original colour sampled.

So a high tolerance will mean that the background eraser will erase a fairly wide range of shades similar to the original colour sampled, whilst a low tolerance will only erase colours very similar to the one sampled.

Oh, and you can choose to use Background Swatch as the colour to be 'sampled' as well, which means the colour chosen as your background colour in the colour picker will be the one erased. Continuous means it will keep resampling the colour under the cursor so if you click and drag it'll basically keep changing the colour to be erased, meaning normally it'll work just like the regular eraser.

Henroid

Yeah, I accidentally faded out part of the image I didn't intend to using the background eraser.