PaintShop Pro Background Eraser

Background Eraser in PaintShop Pro

See the youtube video here: Background Eraser

The background eraser is a nifty tool in PaintShop Pro that can make erasing a simple-homogeneous background from a subject very quick and easy. Note this doesn't work for all images, and in this example I am using a very eraser-friendly (yellow) background, and replacing it with a darker painted (blue) background.

This image is strategic in that it allows us to test with soft edges and hard edges, with a minor tweak in settings to get the best results.

Sharp Edges

For sharp edges, and usually the best settings for a first-pass, I used the background eraser settings as shown below.

Dragging around the subject (making sure to always start with clicking the yellow background) yielded the following result. In the areas of the hair where you can't drag into that region, I simply clicked while the eraser was on yellow pixels.

It's a good start, but note there are strong yellow halos around the hair.

Soft Edges

To address the haloing around hair, the one attribute we change in the background eraser is the Sharpness attribute. Lowering this value allows the erase to blend more into regions that don't match the designated erase color.

You may have to play around with this setting to get the best results. In my case, performing the soft erase on the hair yielded this result. This looks even better, however, one could argue that there is still yellow on the hair (not around it), that doesn't match the background. We can fix this with some layered color blending.

Removing Haloing

To perform a subtle re-coloring of the regions of her hair and shoulders to better blend with the background, lets first sample a color from the background using the color pick tool.

Once we have a nice blue, create a new raster layer, and select the paint brush tool. Use a low hardness, and a low opacity and color over the regions of hair and shoulders that you want to correct.

To make the effect blend better, change the new raster layer to a blend mode of Color. This should yield something like the result below. The shoulders and twirly hair strands no longer exhibit that yellow glow, and helps the subject fit better in the darker background.

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