G'day, I'm Melissa Shanhun, Founder of Digital Scrapbooking
HQ.com and today we're here in Photoshop Elements 2021 for the
ABC's of PSE. Today's Letter of the day is the letter E for the
eraser tool. The eraser tool removes pixels from your
current layer and let's show you how that works. So right
now. I have two layers that you can see one is the white
background layer and then the other one is this black layer
of text. So if I use the eraser tool and just do a few swipes
here and there now wherever I've swiped the eraser, there
is no pixels of any color on that layer. so you can see by
turning off the background layer right through now, This
is where it kind of confuses people because people might
grab a photo like this and be like okay. Well, you know I
want to erase this. Box here So then they do that, but all
they're left with is basically a hole on the photograph now
what they probably want is a spot healing tool, which is the
letter J. So we're not going to go into that today but you
know, click Subscribe. Click The bell icon Get on the email
list so that you won't miss out on everything you need to know
about the spot healing tool instead of like repairing and
retouching a photo the eraser. Simply gets rid of all the
pixels so it can be quite useful. So in this scenario, we
have a digital scrapbook layout with lots of different layers
and if we had a problem, for example with this layer, where
say some of the features were right over someone's face, we
could use the eraser tool there to like remove these dots. Now,
I'm getting a warning to say that the layer has to be.
Simplified your layer that you use the eraser tool on has to
be completely simplified. That means it's not a vector. It's
not text. It's not a smart object. so I'm just going to
click Okay and then you can see using the eraser tool. I can
easily erase those little splashes from wherever I don't
want them to be. There's a couple of different modes to
look at for the eraser tool. We also have the background eraser
and it allows you to remove the background from a photo. So,
for example, I've got this photo of me on a nice obvious
background. And it's pretty easy to remove background
behind me and mostly leave the flowers intact. Background
erase tool can be really useful when you're wanting to remove
someone and put them on the background of something else or
if you've just got a really distracting background and you
want to replace it with the with something else less
distracting. and of course, you can go about it much more
carefully than I am here, but that's just to give you an idea
of what it can do. And you've also got the magic Eraser where
you can just click on a Sec a section and it will use the
Adobe Sensei engine to work out what you're really trying to
delete it will mostly delete contiguous areas. that means
areas of the one color that are touching each other. If you
just the tolerance upwards, you have a better chance of doing
that single. click to erase all of that area and you can always
go back and. Clean it up using the normal eraser so in the
normal eraser, we have some different types, pencil brush
and block, and then you can, of course, use all your brush
options that are there your size drag it up to increase
drag it down to decrease. and if we reduce the opacity of the
erasers, you can see it won't fully erase if it's on 100%, it
will completely take. That away in one stripe, but if the
opacity is lower, I'll zoom in you can see it just very, very
vaguely lightens up those pixels. but once we go back up
to 100, you can remove them. So I hope that has been helpful
and you've learned a little bit about how the eraser. The
background eraser And the Magic Eraser works thanks so much for
watching. If you'd like this video don't forget to leave me
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scrapbooking head to digital scrapbooking HQ.com.