So if your sky is blue and your trees are green, the Background Eraser can easily erase the blue sky while leaving the green trees alone, at least until someone comes along and cuts them down, which makes it all the more important to protect them in your image. It samples colors as you drag the tool over them and erases only those colors, leaving all other colors untouched. It can just as easily be used to erase any part of an image, and that's because the Background Eraser is really a color eraser. The Background Eraser really has nothing to do with erasing backgrounds, since Photoshop has no way of knowing what's considered the background in a photo and what isn't. The Background Eraser is especially useful with photos that contain lots of fine detail along the edges between the foreground and background, like, for example, if you want to erase the sky in an image without first having to select all of the trees below it.ĭon't let the name fool you, though. In this Photoshop tutorial, we look at the Background Eraser Tool and how we can use it to easily remove background areas of an image.