As an eraser tool, it physically deletes pixels from the image, which means that once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. The Background Eraser is, without a doubt, one of the best tools in Photoshop for removing unwanted areas of a photo, but it’s not perfect and it does have one serious drawback.

If you're using Photoshop CS5 or earlier, you can still follow along here, or you can check out the original Background Eraser tutorial. This version of our Background Eraser tutorial has been updated for Photoshop CS6 and is also fully compatible with Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud). So if your sky is blue and your trees are green, the Background Eraser can easily erase the blue sky while leaving the green trees alone, at least until someone comes along and cuts them down, which gives us all the more reason to protect them in the image. It samples colors as you drag the tool over them and erases only those colors, leaving all other colors untouched. It can just as easily be used to erase any part of an image, and that's because the Background Eraser is really a color eraser. The Background Eraser really has nothing to do with erasing backgrounds, since Photoshop has no way of knowing what's considered the background in a photo and what isn't. The Background Eraser Tool is especially useful with photos that contain lots of fine detail along the edges between your subject and its background, like, for example, if you want to erase the sky in an image without erasing the trees below it.īut don't let the name fool you.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn all about the Background Eraser Tool in Photoshop and how to use it to easily remove background areas of an image.

Square eraser photoshop