4 Handy Yet Little-Known Features Of The BG Eraser Tool

If you’ve been youzigning for quite a while now, I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced that magical moment the first time you got your hands on youzign’s magic wand – The Background Eraser tool!

Being able to achieve an isolated image with a transparent background in just a few strokes of green and red, it gave us the power to beat Neil Armstrong to the moon or send our friends to the most remote regions of the planet! Wahooo! 🙂

Thanks to this powerful integration with Clipping Magic, you can easily clip images for your product catalogs, quote graphics, hero banners and other marketing creatives without the need to learn complicated tools like Photoshop.

And if you think the magic ends with the key markers alone, you’re missing half the fun! Since not all images are created equal, you need to fuel up your spells for cutting out images with low contrast, faint edges, or noisy backgrounds.

To help you with these problematic images, I’ll be sharing with you 4 handy yet little-known features of the background tool in this post!

Scalpel

One of the most enchanting features of the BG Eraser tool is the Scalpel.

This little tool pumps up precision to your cuts. It’s handy when clipping images with faint edges, low contrast, and noisy backgrounds.

To use this tool:

1. Start off as usual, mark your foreground and background. This will give you a rough-cut result.
2. Zoom in the edges where you need precision cutting. You can use the pan tool  to move around the image.
3. Click on the Scalpel tool. Click and drag the scalpel to the edges where you want to make a cut.
4.  Make a curve to follow the edges by dragging the darker center point.

Feel free to move points to extend a cut. Notice how smart the algorithm works! You can already see the results on the right as soon as you click and drag the scalpel tool.

Refine Edges

Or simply Edges at the bottom tools menu gives you full control of the edges. Whether it’s an undetected corner or a rough edge to smoothen, you can use these tools to clip your foreground image to your desired result.

Corners

BG Erase tool’s auto corner detection gives you a sharp crisp cut for corners. By default, it’s on but you can turn it off if you prefer.

Smoothing

Basically, the Smoothing feature allows you to round out your cut and manage uneven edges. By default, this is set to Adaptive Smoothing which is the lowest smoothness level. This is to preserve the sharp outline and to avoid rounding out undetected corners.

Adaptive Smoothing as its name implies adapts to the original character of the foreground. It preserves the distinct feel of sharp edges while uneven edges are smoothed out evenly.

Fixed Smoothing on the other hand, lets you control the smoothing level up to the highest setting. You might need to turn off Corner Detection to achieve its full effect.

Corner Marks

Some images with low contrast or faint edges might require a higher level of smoothing that it’s unavoidable to round out undetected corners. For such instance, you can use this feature to retrieve overly smoothed corners. You can use the basic green or red marks to signal the clipping path to respect the corner.

Hair

Images with messy hair as subjects are challenging work. But as advanced wizards, you can use this tool to preserve almost every strand flying on the background. To use this feature:

1. Start as usual. Mark your foreground and background. This will give you a rough-cut result.
2. Highlight the hair using the hair brush.
3. The feature works using two palettes: one for the foreground and one for the background. Use the green Eyedrop to pick colors of the hair and the red Eyedrop for the background.
4. As soon as you’ve added some colors to each palette, the foreground should start separating from the background.

Result comparison:

Finishing Touches

Now that you’re done with removing the background image, you can polish your cutouts and publish better results with the help of these tools:

Colors 

You can leave the background transparent or use the color picker to pick a color. You can also adjust brightness, add highlights and more to your cutout.

Crop 

Simply click and drag the corners to crop and resize your cutout. You can also rotate, straighten it or lock an Aspect Ratio or a Target Pixel Size.

Shadow

Adding shadows to your cut out helps with lighting and makes it look natural. You can add a reflection or manually cast and drop shadows and control its opacity and radius.

There you go!

I hope you find this post helpful in maximizing your use of the Background Eraser tool.
Try these little handy features and see the amazing results for yourself! Remember,

“The difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary is practice”. 🙂

Let us know in the comments how you use this magic wand for your marketing creatives.

To your success!

P.S. If you haven’t tried Youzign before, now is the best time to do so! We’re currently offering a risk-free trial so you can test out Youzign and all its great features including the BG eraser tool plus templates for 2 weeks.

Register for a FREE trial account here.