Learn the Paint Shop Pro Eraser Tool!

The eraser tool is very self explanatory. All you need to do is experiment with the parameters a bit to find out the limits of this tool. Like always, before we look to deep into it, we need to find where it is first!

Since its tool bar arrangements are similar to Photoshop, it’s easy to know where to look.

Near the middle of the tool bar, you should see an icon showing the eraser part of a pencil.

1. Locating the eraser

As soon as you click on the icon, you will get two different types of erasers: the normal eraser and the background eraser.

Also, the Paint Shop Pro eraser tool has a nice little trick: if you left click, it will start erasing it. If you use the right button, it will reverse what you have erased!

One note of caution: if you use the regular eraser and you erase outside of your object area, it will reveal different colors not in the original image by actually painting on the area with those colors.

Now, depending on your usage, one will be better than the other. The normal eraser is the one that you should use the most option simply because it does what it does best: to erase a particular part of the painting.

Sounds confusing? That’s why you should try both of these tools out for yourself!

2. The Paint Shop Pro eraser options

Like always, once you click on a tool, you will immediate brought up with a list of options necessary to manipulate the tool. For the Paint Shop Pro eraser tool, the options are as follows:

As you can see, these options are fairly explanatory. Compared to other programs, Paint Shop Pro is one of those programs that have a large number of eraser options available. Some of these that I find very useful are the rotation option and the thickness.

Basically, you can rotate your eraser tool to fit specific angles. This is very useful when dealing with perspective drawings. As well, you can fit into smaller grooves with the thickness option that you normally can’t get with just a square eraser.

Furthermore, if you pick the background eraser tool, you will get an additional option called ‘tolerance’ and ‘sharpness.’ Both deal with the underlying idea that you are planning to leave the erased edges very cleanly and sharply.

3. The history box?

Looks familiar? It should as Photoshop also has a history box!

As soon as you start an activity, either with the Paint Shop Pro eraser tool or the brushes, it automatically gets recorded into the history box.

So instead of using the Paint Shop Pro eraser tool to correct mistaken airbrush lines, you can always use this box to go back in time as though you never made the mistake at all!

All you need to do is choose the points where you want to go back to with your mouse, click on it, and then that’s it! Moreover, the history box has a funky little option to record points of interest into macros.

That means you can save the macros and use them in other paintings to paint the same thing as before!

4. Moving forward

With experience, you will find other unique properties of the Paint Shop Pro eraser tool. It behaves quite differently from other digital art programs, simply due to the left and right clicks button implementations, which is why you need to get used to it.

However, if this is your first time using it without experimenting on other digital art programs, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

In the end, where it looks like a program that competes with Photoshop at first, it really is an entirely different beast. Depending on how you paint, you may, or may not, need extra clicks here and there to get the right options.

Paint Shop Pro is intuitive for most things; but at the same time, it is not for some things.

Keep motivated to learn Paint Shop Pro’s tools and it will become second nature!

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