How To Clear Pixels In Photoshop

The Eraser tool changes pixels to either the background color or to transparent. If you're working on a background or in a layer with transparency locked, the pixels change to the background color; otherwise, the pixels are erased to transparency.

You can also use the eraser to return the affected area to a state selected in the History panel.

Photoshop performs intelligent smoothing on your brush strokes. Simply enter a value (0-100) for Smoothing in the Options bar when you're working with one of the following tools: Brush, Pencil, Mixer Brush, or Eraser. A value of 0 is the same as legacy smoothing in earlier versions of Photoshop. Higher values apply increasing amounts of intelligent smoothing to your strokes.

Stroke smoothing works in several modes. Clicking the gear icon () to enable one or more of the following modes:

When you click in a layer with the Magic Eraser tool, the tool changes all similar pixels to transparent. If you're working in a layer with locked transparency, the pixels change to the background color. If you click in the background, it is converted to a layer and all similar pixels change to transparent.

You can choose to erase contiguous pixels only or all similar pixels on the current layer.

The Background Eraser tool erases pixels on a layer to transparency as you drag. You can erase the background while maintaining the edges of an object in the foreground. By specifying different sampling and tolerance options, you can control the range of the transparency and the sharpness of the boundaries.

If you want to erase the background of an object with intricate or wispy edges, use QuickSelect.

The background eraser samples the color in the center of the brush, also called the hotspot, and deletes that color wherever it appears inside the brush. It also performs color extraction at the edges of any foreground objects, so that color halos are not visible if the foreground object is later pasted into another image.

The background eraser overrides the lock transparency setting of a layer.

The Auto Erase option for the Pencil tool lets you paint the background color over areas containing the foreground color.