Expert: LizaL - 7/27/2005

Question
Hi Liza,

I've got a few photoshop questions for you. I am currently using CS.

1. When I use the slice tool it gives me a weird marquee type box around the whole image with like a "01 box lock" type signage in the top left corner. What's all this about. I dont even know what the slice tool is used for. And it appears to lock the eraser tools as well. How do I get rid of this marquee-lock thingy.

2. When I use the eyedropper tool it sets the background colour by default. A couple of weeks ago when I used it, the foreground colour was set by default. I must have done something to change this. Do you know what. I know if you hold down the ALT key it alternates between choosing background and foreground colour. I just want to know how to set the default.

3. When I use the background eraser tool, it erases to a colour and not to the grey checked background. I was wandering why

Thanks
Rgds
Rob


Answer
Hi Rob,

To answer your questions in the order that you posed them...

1. The slice tool *should* give you just what you describe! What the slice tool does, in effect, is divide an image into different sections -- with the intent of optimizing each separate section for use on the Web. So you should see a marquee, and you should see a number with a little box to the right of the number.

If you take your Slice Select tool, located in the same space as the slice tool and double-click on that little box, you'll see that slice's options come up in the form of a dialog box.

Now what baffles me is that you say you can't use your eraser tool when you've sliced something. Can you be more descriptive about this? I tried slicing an image and had no problems using any of the erasing tools, either inside or outside the slice. Make sure you're erasing from the layer you intend to erase -- make sure you haven't accidentally put yourself on a new layer, for instance, and are trying to erase a blank layer.


2. Actually, I don't know what you've done to make the eyedropper tool keep setting your background color. Holding down the Alt key while clicking will definitely let you change your background color on the fly, but there's no reason it should *stay* that way. There are no set preferences for the eyedropper tool where you can specify it to choose back- or foreground colors; it simply reacts to keyboard commands, such as holding down the Alt key. You can also select different-sized samples using the eyedropper tool, but you would do that using the eyedropper sampler tool, which is located under the regular eyedropper tool -- but this is about the extent of this tool's talents.

You can, however, make sure you don't have any type of accidental presets turned on, and if you do, turn them off by first selecting the eyedropper tool, then clicking on its icon in the options bar under the pulldown menus (top left of the screen), and clicking on the flyout arrow -- like this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/eyedropper_presets.gif

Select Reset Tool and see if that helps.


3. The background eraser samples the color in the center of the brush you're using for your eraser, and deletes that color wherever it appears inside the brush. That is, if you drag over one particular shade of red, the background eraser will "search" for other shades of that red and delete them, as you drag with the background eraser.

It's hard for me to know what to tell you here, because I can't see your file. Do you have a layer underneath the current layer, so that if you erase in your image, you're seeing that color underneath?

Or it's possible that you have colors selected as your fore- and background colors. Then you could very possibly be erasing to either of those, causing your background eraser to erase the background of your image, and leave you with either your fore- or background color in your color swatches.

You might want to take a look at this explanation of the background eraser:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/blrbps_1jet.htm


The gray, checked background will only be your background if you have nothing below it -- or if, when creating a new Photoshop file, you've specified the file to have a transparent background.


Hope this helps --

Lisa