Eraser Photoshop Brush
Karri Weston
In this tutorial, I show you two quick and easy ways to turn your current brush into an eraser when painting in Photoshop! Now you may be thinking that the obvious way to erase a brush stroke is to use Photoshop's Eraser Tool. But the problem is that the Brush Tool and the Eraser Tool do not share the same settings. So if you switch to the Eraser Tool after painting with a custom brush, you'll be erasing with a different brush or with different settings.
What if you want to erase using the same brush that you painted with? It's actually very easy, and in this quick tutorial, I'll show you two ways to do it. The first way uses blend modes and works with any recent version of Photoshop. And the second way to erase with your current brush is brand new as of Photoshop 2020. At the end of the tutorial, we'll look at why turning your brush into an eraser only works when painting on a separate layer.
Note that Adobe made changes to the brushes back in Photoshop CC 2018. So if you're using an earlier version, your list of brushes will look different. For this tutorial, it doesn't matter which brush you choose, but pick something other than a standard round brush:
To resize your brush, use the left or right bracket key on your keyboard. The right bracket key ( ] ) makes the brush larger and the left bracket key ( [ ) makes it smaller.
Then if you have actual painting skills, go ahead and start painting something impressive. Or if you're more like me, just scribble something. And we now have a brush stroke in front of the background:
But as soon as we start dragging over the brush stroke with the Eraser Tool, we see the problem. The Eraser Tool is using a different brush than the one we painted with. That's because the Brush Tool and the Eraser Tool are separate tools, and they each have their own settings.
Rather than using Photoshop's Eraser Tool to erase a brush stroke, we can actually turn the Brush Tool itself into an eraser, which means we'll be erasing using the same brush and settings that we painted with! And there are two easy ways to do it. One works with any recent version of Photoshop, and one is brand new as of Photoshop CC 2020.
This first way to turn your brush into an eraser works with any recent version of Photoshop. With your Brush Tool still active, go up to the Options Bar and change the brush blend mode from Normal to Clear:
Earlier, I mentioned that it's very important to paint on a separate layer rather than painting directly on the Background layer. So let's finish up with a look at what happens when we try to erase a brush stroke that we've painted on the Background layer.
The first method we looked at for turning your brush into an eraser was by changing the brush's blend mode to Clear. But if you've painted on the Background layer, you'll find that the Clear blend mode in the Options Bar is grayed out and unavailable. So this first method won't work:
And the second method was to press and hold the tilde key to temporarily turn the brush into an eraser. But the main reason why we can't erase a brush stroke on the Background layer is because Background layers do not support transparency. So even though you can still hold down the tilde key to erase, you won't get the result you were expecting.
Instead, notice that with my tilde key held down, all I'm doing is painting with white. Where is the white coming from? Since Background layers do not support transparency, Photoshop is instead filling the erased areas with the current Background color, which by default is white:
So again, if you want to be able to erase your brush strokes, make sure you paint on a separate layer. And even if you won't need to erase them, painting on a separate layer will still allow you to work non-destructively and prevent any permanent changes to your background image.
And there we have it! That's two easy ways to turn your brush into an eraser in Photoshop! Check out our Photoshop Basics section for more tutorials. And don't forget, all of our Photoshop tutorials are available to download as PDFs!
I've seen in other threads that this has been an issue for several users. I use that toggle in Clip Studio Paint quite a bit and as sometimes I still paint some quick things in Photoshop, I would love to assign a shortkey to the same button on my Cintiq remote. That muscle memory is always kicking in.
Has that issue been solved by now? I know that there's some sort of toggle for US citizens with the tilde key. But for one, I don't have a tilde key and secondly, from what I've read, that's a hold-and-release toggle, which isn't the best when you use the eraser for a bit longer.
I ended up buying the Togglerator plugin from Gumroad which does exactly what I need. It has a little lag when you switch, but that's OK. Eventually this should be implemented in Photoshop. It really is a very convenient toggle and there's a reason why it is in Clip Studio Paint as well.
There's no real toggle for the actual paintbrush tool, except for that hold and release tilde toggle yo mention. BUT, you can try using the B shortcut and the E shortcut to jump between tools. Since I don't have a Cintiq, I'm unsure how you'd set that in it's tools. For my Intuos Pro, I can assign a button, or set up the setting in the tablet driver.
I got SO excited when I saw this - so I tried it on my Mac. Turns out, while that may work well on Windows, it doesn't exist on the Mac. In fact, I tried with many key combinations, and haven't been able to find it (and don't see the option in the customize keyboard shortcuts command. I'd LOVE to find this, so if anyone does know about it on Mac, please chime in!
A mistake i've made so many times is trying to change the Brush Mode to Behind or Clear only to realize those Brush Modes and their respective keyboard shortcuts only work if the layer is not the Background layer or a Layer Mask.
Thanks for suggesting that. I have already known about that one. Unfortunately it's not a toggle, just a shortcut to jump to the "Clear" mode. And when I hit SHIFT-ALT-R again, nothing happens and it stays in the "Clear" mode. The difference is, that a toggle can be assigned to ONE button on my remote, which is very easy to use.
The issue hasn't been corrected yet, but i found an easy fix. With Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator you can remap any key to the desired one, even if not the same language. So using it, i've remap my key (french keyboard) into ` key (unicode U+0060) which behave like the tilde shorcut, it is still a toggle hold and release but works like it should.
New Canvas- fill with colour no problem but using a simple brush or simple eraser does not work. If I use the pattern type brushes no problem. Opacity etc set to 100%
CLUE Eraser only works if set to Block NOT Brush or Pencil
Thank You for your response. I had tried resetting the brushes but to no avail. What I have found out is that if I select Basic Brushes, then everything works but many from the other brush sets simply do not work either in Brush mode or Eraser.
Just wondering if anyone managed to figure out this problem. I seem to be having the exact same problem with my photoshop cs3 software. My erasers do not work other than with the pattern and block brushes.
My erase tool does not work when I am using layer adjustments>levels. It works if I paint some color on a photo, but when I try and erase part of the levels adjustments the erasing does not occur, even though I have opacity up to %100. I tried all the suggestions from the other posts but still am having a problem
In top you can navigate to tools > scripts > ten brushes. There you can set your preferred eraser to number one. The shortcut displayed there will switch from current preset to this eraser and reverse way.
Those shortcuts can be changed as any other in settings > configure krita > keyboard shortcuts
For example, you can press the F5-Button to reach the Brush-Editor, the other way to reach the Brush-Editor is to click on the Toolbar-Button marked in the following screenshot - the one displaying the icon of the currently selected preset - on the left side of the Button with the 4 squares in it.
Brush-Editor1269132 14.2 KB
I am not seeing these icons. I will say that I do not have anything other than the bog standard brushes plus the ones I have made. Every category of brush that I choose lets me use it as an eraser. On pixel layers, no Vector brushes.
OMG thank you @iconoclast. That is exactly what I was looking for. I'm not looking forward to the task of having to go through each and every brush, in each and every application on both macOS and iPadOS (x2) and change that setting (ahem, some brush management and scripting features would be awesome), but at least it gives me a way to deal with it now. Thanks again.
With regards to brushes and erase options...I have never really assigned a specific brush to function as an eraser!...as you can just hit the 'E' key when using a brush to switch toggle to erase mode...Also you can use Control key with pixel brush mode in the same way...
Do you have examples of brushes that cannot be used with the Eraser Brush Tool? As far as I know, any brush can be used with the Eraser, though for ones specifically associated with some other tool you may need to switch to the Eraser after choosing the brush, as mentioned by StuartRC.
It is possible that is is simply a remnant of the creation process for 3rd party brushes.. If they were created using photo and assigned a tool...that's fine for photo. but the option is not yet available in designer... I am sure it will get added at some point!... cannot help you with the iPad...don't have one!
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