Expert: Glen Demers - 10/7/2010

Question
Hi Glen,

What I am asking you, and I hope that you understand. But in Photoshop 7 (and I work with it too). But, I heard and I have done this, removing, erasing the background and you can protect the foreground color from accidentally being erased when you are removing and erasing the background. Now, what I am asking, you is, Glen.

If you do erase the foreground from removing, erasing the background and if you do paint the foreground edges and not paint where the background use to be actually it will be transparent, the background and you do not want to paint it, but just the foreground color touching it up. Is there a way you can do this? I am just wondering. I know, undo erasing. But, what happens if you find out later that you actually made a mistake?

I guess to make this clear is. All right I told you about protecting the foreground color from being erased, but is there a way to not paint the background from the edges of an image(s) from being when you erased the background. Where you do not paint the background at all just the foreground color that you want to touch up from accidentally being erased when you erased the background. Alright, not protecting the background from being accidentally being painted to touch up the foreground when you remove and erase the background of an image. I hope I cleared myself up here, Glen.

I hope you just understood what I am asking you and I hope that you can help me with this one as you have been very helpful in the past. Thank you, Glen.

Sincerely yours,

Martin C. Meyer

P.S.

And as I am thinking about removing and erasing backgrounds which I never asked you, I can work with edges like squares, but circles it would be kind of difficult to remove the back ground of an image the has curves, like a circle and work on the edges, not as easy to do as a image like a square from removing the back ground. So, would there be a simpler way of working on a circle, curves in a image by removing the background as to me I can work with square edges on a image?.

And. As I have told you, Glen I will contact you again for any more assistance that I may need, if that is alright with you. And again, thanks.

Answer
Hi Martin,

Once you've opened an image either double click on the background layer in the layers palette to make it layer 0, or go to Layer>New>Layer via Copy to make a new layer and turn off the background layer. With the new layer selected go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All. This will make a white box in the layers palette. With the foreground color set to black, paint anywhere you want the image erased. If you erase too much, paint over it with the foreground color set to white.

In the channels palette, you can turn on the layer mask and it will appear like a quick-mask or you can turn off the color channels and work on just the mask. Back in the Layers palette, if you shift click on the layer mask icon, you can turn the mask on or off. You can use any of the drawing tools to edit the layer mask.

With a mask, your image remains untouched and you can adjust the mask.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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