Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Recommended Posts

Sometimes when I'm editing a photo I want to completely erase something but it's only a few pixels wide but when I use the eraser tool it doesn't completely erase it only makes it a bit transparent. I was wondering if there was a way to make the eraser completely erase something the first time you click it and not have to wiggle your cursor around or have to click multiple times. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A few questions:

 

You said that the Flow and Opacity is turned up all the way. Is so your hardness? And are you switching brushes? If you change your brush while the eraser is selected, your hardness and flow may change. Also, where is your layer transparency and color opacity set at?

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Bri-Toon said:

A few questions:

 

You said that the Flow and Opacity is turned up all the way. Is so your hardness? And are you switching brushes? If you change your brush while the eraser is selected, your hardness and flow may change. Also, where is your layer transparency and color opacity set at?

My Hardness is all the way up, the layer transparency is at 100%, I'm not switching brushes and my colour opacity is at full.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's strange. Everything sounds right. Could you perhaps attach a video so we can take a closer look?

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see. The edges of brushes will have an anti-aliasing effect to them (blurred out), so when using the smallest width size (1 PX), the brush itself will appear transparent like in your case. It sounds like you are looking for something similar to Photoshop's Pencil mode in their Eraser Tool, something with aliasing erasing (sharp cuts). There is currently no aliasing erasing feature in Photo, but if you create a mask on your layer, you can use the Pixel Tool as an eraser. It is hidden under the Paint Brush Tool. With the mask thumbnail selected, just have the color set to black, and you can erase parts of your image. Have it set to white, and you can bring them back. This, however, only puts the regions in a mask, so you are not actually erasing.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure thing. Just remember that the mask "thumbnail" needs to be selected in order for the masking to work.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Bri-Toon said:

It sounds like you are looking for something similar to Photoshop's Pencil mode in their Eraser Tool, something with aliasing erasing (sharp cuts).

The Affinity Photo Pixel Tool is (more or less) the equivalent of the PS Pencil mode. When selected, the AP Pixel Tool has an "Alternate" option on the Context toolbar. Set that to "Erase" (or "Background Color"). This changes the effect of the tool when the 'alternate' key is held down.

 

A bit confusingly, on a Mac the 'alternate' key is not alt/option but CMD. However, the Status bar at the bottom of the window should tell users which key invokes the 'alternate' action, so it is not too bad if you refer to that.

 

Anyway, with appropriate Opacity, Flow, Blend mode, Alternate mode, etc. set in the Context toolbar, the Pixel Tool with the appropriate keyboard key held down should produce hard-edged, aliased erasures.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ah thanks for the tip. I forgot all about the status bar. Holding command while using the Pixel Tool does the trick.

 

The "Alternate" menu was hiding because I had my window at a smaller size. Good to know.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 years later...

I am having the same difficulty when trying to erase the "debris" left behind by a mask after refining. I am selecting a trees from a photograph. I refine the mask. I invert the selection and delete the background so I have only the tree.s The problem is, I still have debris, or shadows around the trees that were not totally deleted. In addition, I need to duplicate the layer of the selection and merge the selection about four times so the trees do not appear translucent.  When I use the erase tool to remove the junk around my trees, it takes NUMEROUS passes over the unwanted shadows to completely remove them. I have the flow, opacity and hardness all at 100%. 

1. I am frustrated that the mask does not cleanly delete the background.

3. I am frustrated the selection appears somewhat translucent as compared to the original.

2. I am frustrated that the erase tool is somewhat transparent when using it.

Any suggestions?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, OldDog said:

I am having the same difficulty when trying to erase the "debris" left behind by a mask after refining. I am selecting a trees from a photograph. I refine the mask. I invert the selection and delete the background so I have only the tree.s The problem is, I still have debris, or shadows around the trees that were not totally deleted. In addition, I need to duplicate the layer of the selection and merge the selection about four times so the trees do not appear translucent.  When I use the erase tool to remove the junk around my trees, it takes NUMEROUS passes over the unwanted shadows to completely remove them. I have the flow, opacity and hardness all at 100%. 

1. I am frustrated that the mask does not cleanly delete the background.

3. I am frustrated the selection appears somewhat translucent as compared to the original.

2. I am frustrated that the erase tool is somewhat transparent when using it.

Any suggestions?

First, select a basic round brush when the erase tool is active. If you have any other brush active (which is not shown in UI) this might explain.

to check, deactivate all layers, then add a pixel layer on top, fill with solid color, and try out the erase tool, it should fully erase the color in one stroke. If not, focus on getting this corrected before continuing on you image. Do  this test in the actual document, not a new file. Use info panel to inspect numeric values, alpha should go from 100% / 255 to 0.

Then, duplicating and merging a layer 4 times is suboptimal process.

You can add a curves or levels adjustment to boost alpha channel values.

PS: assuming you use the erase on the mask, and not on the pixel layer.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your workflow isn't really clear to me. You have used a mask to get rid of a background - why do you use the Eraser? Wouldn't it be the better way to get rid of the debris  by using the mask again by painting on it with black colour and a suitable brush? You can do that almost similar as with the eraser, but you work on the mask that is already there, and it is non-destructive - you can restore everything you erased by just changing the foreground colour to white and paint with it. You can easily switch between black and white by hitting "X", by the way.

Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote, so Sorry and just ignore me in that case.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a reply to NotMyFault, thank you for the advice. 

I’m sorry, I am very new to Affinity photo. Please explain what UI means.

I did discover, I have a choice of masking brushes, which I was not aware of. I tried using a round solid brush on a different photo, just to see if this brush made any difference. The areas that I selected were much cleaner. Also, when I deleted the background, no “shadows” around the subject were left. Therefore no need to use the eraser tool to remove them. In addition, the subject was not translucent at all.

I did try the eraser tool on a separate pixel layer as suggested. The eraser tool worked fine on that. I found the info panel. Unfortunately, I do not understand the meaning of alpha should go from 100% / 255 to 0.”

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In response to ICONOCLAST, I tried to use the eraser because the mask did not remove all of the background.

In any case. I decided to follow you suggestion to use a mask, and paint the areas that I want to remove with black paint.

I opened a photo. Pressed the letter Q. The red mask covered the photo. However, no matter what I tried, I was unable to paint on the mask at all. Obviously I am doing something wrong.  I just don’t know what it is.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, OldDog said:

Please explain what UI means.

User Interface.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, OldDog said:

In response to ICONOCLAST, I tried to use the eraser because the mask did not remove all of the background.

In any case. I decided to follow you suggestion to use a mask, and paint the areas that I want to remove with black paint.

I opened a photo. Pressed the letter Q. The red mask covered the photo. However, no matter what I tried, I was unable to paint on the mask at all. Obviously I am doing something wrong.  I just don’t know what it is.

Ah, so you were talking about a Quickmask. I thought you meant a Layer Mask. While a Quick Mask is a feature that is mainly used to refine selections, you can use a Layer Mask to erase directly on the layer - without really erasing anything. In fact you only paint opaque pixels to become transparent with it. And you can easily paint them opaque again. You only need to add a Layer Mask to the layer for it and to paint on it with the Paint Brush with any brush and settings you want and with black colour. To make it more clear: a Layer Mask is only a greyscale image that is used as a mask. Black represents full transparency, greys semitransparency and white full opacity. So you can restore everything you erased this way by painting with white on the Layer Mask. And you can switch quick and easy between black and white with the "X"-key. Very cool feature.

If you have a selection, you can of course also fill it with black on the Layer Mask to make everything transparent that's inside the selection. Or with white to make it opaque.

You find the button for Layer Masks at the bottom of the Layers Panel.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, OldDog said:

I do not understand the meaning of alpha should go from 100% / 255 to 0.”

The info panel shows a numeric value for every color channel, including the alpha channel.

You can choose how colors are shows,  normally it shows RGBA in a scale from 0 (black) to 255 (white). On alpha channel, 0 means fully transparent, 255 means fully opaque. 
You can chance the info panel to show percentages 0-100% or hex code 00-FF.

Only if the info picker shows 0 you can be sure no debris is left. 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In addition to what NotMyFault wrote: RGB-colours are defined by values from 0 to 255 (8 Bit, in 16 or 32 Bit, you have much more values) per channel (Red channel, Green channel and Blue channel). So you have 256 possible values for each channel. If all channels are on 0, you have pure black because all lights are out. If all channels are on 255, you have pure white, because all lights are to the max and the colours mix up to white (remember Isaac Newton). All other variations mix the different colours.

The Alpha Channel, which is for the opacity/transparency of pixels, is defined by values in percentage (from 0% = zero opacity, to 100% = full opacity).

Hope it makes it clearer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.