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I often use the old "Color select/erase" button to quickly remove certain colors from photographs. In X10 that button is now the "Select Colors to Enhance" button.
I like the tolerance and fade options with this new button, but is there any way to use this to make a section transparent?
I've added the old button back onto the toolbar, but it doesn't have the same tolerance and fade options as the new button.
an excellent question
the new tool is tagged 'enhance' not 'select/erase' and as far as I know the enhance functions do not include transparency; maybe they should have left the other tool in place [with a different icon of course] or maybe they thought that would just confuse their users who are, of course, easily [confused] :rolleyes:
Just had a look, the old button still has the tolerance and fade sliders over to the left.
true enough
however it seems that one is not a repalcement for the other, so why did the first disappear off the UI ? [maybe there just wasn't room on the interface for both without spending some more time re-programmimg it]
Yeah I don't know. Maybe with the background eraser and the newer enhance tool they thought the old tool wasn't as important anymore.
could be - but I think its all down to the web-focus this time round...
I just played around with this because you guys got my curiosity up. Took me a bit to figure out but it works better than the provious did.
Erasing backgrounds
This feature is particularly good for erasing or changing the background behind complex shapes such as fur, hair, trees etc, that would be tedious, or impossible to mask manually. You only need to indicate the approximate areas to erase (with the Eraser tool) and the areas to protect (with the Mask Painter Tool), and then click the 'Erase background' button.
1. Use the Eraser Tool to roughly paint over the parts of the picture you want to erase (the background).
2. Select the Mask Painter Tool and paint over some of the parts of the foreground you want to keep.
3. Select the Eraser Tool again and then click on Erase background on the top infobar.
If the foreground is all a similar color you only need to cover part of it with the mask. If the foreground has differing colors, then paint the mask over each of the differing color areas. Use zoom (Ctrl+mouse wheel) to mask more or less detail and try not to mask over any background color or regions.
If you make a mistake hold Shift to un-paint the mask. If you aren't happy with the results you can Undo (Ctrl+Z) and change the mask, or the erased parts, and try again. In this way you can gradually improve the result by undoing, adjusting the mask and erased parts of the image then pressing Erase Background again. To improve the results for a particular part of an image, make the masked and erased areas more accurately indicate the foreground and background in that part of the image, to improve the result in that area. There is also a handy ? button on the top infobar which you can click to show a step by step guide for this feature.