why does the magic eraser tool delete everything?

[clareb32062298]

I'm having such a nightmare with photoshop at the moment, resisting the urge to throw my laptop out the window...

I learnt photoshop a few years ago and was fairly proficient but have come back to it after a year or 2 and with this new version I don't have a clue what i'm doing.

I'm trying to use the background eraser on a few images but when I click the magic eraser it just deletes everything. The background eraser tool turns all the areas I erase into rectangles and the find edges option just doesnt work at all.

I've read about rasterizing etc, dont have a clue what I means but I tried that as well as the smart object thing but it just deletes the entire image.

I just want to delete the background of this but it wont even let me do it by hand

[Derek Cross]

There are lots of ways of doing this. Try the Quick Selection tool or the Magic Wand tool. Also when you get a mo learn to use these tools non-destructively.

Lynda.com have excellent Photoshop online video tutorials and you can get a free 30-day trial.

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

The Magic Eraser is like the Magic Wand—it's a color-based tool, so you have to watch the Tolerance value. A lower value is less tolerant of a color-change. The default 32 is way to high for the background of your image—that's why it's eating away at the interior light colors. Try 10, and just keep clicking.

A better—but still good for beginners—approach is to use the Quick Select tool. Drag over what you want to keep until you get a nice smooth boundary around both tickets. Keep an eye on the text counters (the enclosed spaces inside a letter like a O or an dP). Then use Layer > New > Layer Via Copy to jump the tickets to a new layer, and hide the original layer.

At some point you will want to explore Select and Mask, which is a non-destructive way to refine the edge of the tickets to get exactly what you need.