Background Erase

Background Erase is brand new in Photo & Graphic Designer 9. It is similar to Designer Pro X’s Color Select/Erase. With one major exception, Backagound Erase is 10 times better. In Designer Pro X, you can select an area or several areas on a background and erase that area. And it works pretty well if the area is solid, but there is still a bit of fringe left over around the edges. Background Erase does a much cleaner job. Here’s how it works:

This is the original photo that is on a pale orange mottled background with a soft shadow.

With the Mask Painter Tool, draw a small mask area over part of the image that you want to retain, but be careful not to mask any of the background color. This step samples the colors you want to preserve.

Use the Eraser Tool to erase part of the background and in this case some of the shadow areas, though I could have left them in as well. This determines the color or colors to be removed.

Press Erase Background and voila! Even, the subtle soft shadow is gone, and the edges around the berries and leaves are clean and sharp. Don’t you just love it!

New Live Effects Filters

The Live Effects Tool has moved into the Photo Tool fly out as you can see here. In addition to the standard filters, there are 11 new filters starting with Fake HDR. You’re probably wondering what the heck is Fake HDR? The mystery is explained if you hover over the question mark icon that now appears with many menus and dialogs and provides a brief explanation of the tool or function. I will show the new live effects filters below and attempt to provide a brief description of each.

The Original Photo

Fake HDR Simulates the effect of high dynamic range

Orton Blurs the image to accentuate some colors

Little Planet Turns the image into a mini planet

Pencil Turns an image into various drawings

Tilt Shift Blurs parts of the image with the slider settings

Lomo Distorts colors to create a processed look

Color Splash Turns image into b&w retains some colors

Polarized Grayscale Cycles through Polarized values

Negative Provides a range of negative color effects

Sepia Creates a range of sepia color options

Thermal Simulates a thermal imaging camera

The slider settings provide a range of effects for each filter. Add this to the FX filters that already exist, and you have an awesome collection of heavy duty photo and vector filter effects.

Variations created with Pencil filter slider settings.

Variations created with the Color Mix filter slider settings that mixes up the RGB channels creating some very interesting effects. And as I think I mentioned, you can apply these new filters to vector drawings as well.