erasing elements of a layer

[Daniel Myers]

I am new to Elements and using a 2.66 Ghz laptop running XP Home with 512 of ram.

I opened a map gif of Glacier Bay from the web and changed it to RGB. Then added a layer. On the layer I used the brush tool to paint white over the background to show the recession of the glaciers over the past 300 years.

I had planned on doing a Save As... for each recorded date of obvservation then erase the parts of the glaciers that had receded.

When I tried to erase portions of the drawing, the eraser tool allowed me to erase just a small bit of the white, then stopped. I was unable to erase any more of the white. I even held the mouse button down thinking the redraw time was lagging behind, but that only caused the Layer palette and the Tools palette to blink out to gray then back to normal again.

What's going on here? Am I asking it to do something it can't? I had to work backwards from most recent history to the past by doing a Save As... and adding to the white portions. But I really would have liked just to erase away the parts of the glaciers that had melted.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Beth Haney]

What was the format of the map you downloaded? I can't tell you what's going on or why, but I can say that I downloaded a gif of Glacier Bay, saved it as a PSD, converted it from indexed color to RGB, created a duplicate layer, and... I can't erase any of it either. I think it has something to do with the way in which the original image was created. Either that or you and I both have broken Elements! :)

This is interesting. I'll be waiting for somebody to explain this to us.

[Richard Coencas]

Beth,

This has peaked my interest. Could you email me that gif? I'd like to see what is going on here.

Thanks,

Rich
[email]rcoencas@adobe.com[/email]

[Jodi Frye]

Try as i may i could not duplicate the error. I converted images to all sorts of formats, reconverted, played with 'background' layers and editable layers...no such weirdness.

[Beth Haney]

And I just duplicated the error. I'd tossed the first little image, so I went back to Google, found it again, downloaded, went through the same routine and came up... with the same result. I've sent it off to Rich. The only different here is that you're using PSE 1. Hmmm. I have that installed on this computer, maybe I'll try opening it there and see if my results are any different.

[Beth Haney]

In PSE 1, I'm getting erratic behavior. I can erase sometimes, and it seems to work more often on the layer copy than the background layer. Weird. It's still not really usable, because you can't predict exactly when something is going to disappear and when it won't. :(

[Richard Coencas]

Got the image. Thanks. I'll report back here if and when I figure out what is going on.

Rich

[Beth Haney]

Yo! Daniel! I gotta say this quick before Rich comes back to rat me out! I told him he had the right to publicly humiliate me, but I didn't really mean it. I made a really stupid mistake on mine, which, of course, Rich spotted right away. My software works flawlessly; it's the operator that need to have her Preference deleted or something. :)

Post back and list the steps you took. Now I'm confused, and I think I set my image up differently when I was testing. It was just by accident that I got the same result.

[Daniel Myers]

Richard,

I am sending you the image just as it came from the web. I did a quick fix to make the land look more green and brown than the original red. It was taken from satellite using infrared.

Thanks for your help!

Daniel

[Richard Coencas]

Daniel,

I am yet to receive the file. You may want to double check the email address, [email]rcoencas@adobe.com[/email].

I'll keep an eye out.

Rich

[Daniel Myers]

Beth,

I'll try it again tonight and note the steps I make.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Richard Coencas]

Daniel,

I got your email, but the file came through with a .sub extension. I'm not familiar with that. Is it a Gif? Could you possibly use a zip or sit archive to compress it and resend. Possibly got corrupted in the mail. Or else you could post a URL to the location you got it from and I'll grab it myself.

Thanks,

Rich

[Daniel Myers]

Rich,

I got it from

<http://sdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/GLACIER.BAY/gfx/sm.alaska.mss86.sub.gif>

But here is the weird thing. I had to open the gif in Paint because I couldn't "see" the gif file in the Open dialog box of Elements. So I had change it to a TIFF in Paint. I also change a copy to a bit map. Now here is where it gets weird. I opened both the bit map and the TIFF in Elements tonight, changed it to RGB, and added a layer. Now I can erase with no problem whatsoever! I think I may be living in the Twilight Zone!

I'm not sure what I did the first time, but now I am OK.

Daniel

[Richard Coencas]

Daniel,

I can't seem to repro the problem here either. Some phantom setting maybe that got messed up. Some good trouble shooting suggestions for the future would be to click on the left side of the tool's option bar and choose Reset Tool or Reset All Tools, this will often clear up those kinds of phantom settings where something got messed up. If that doesn't work the next one is to delete prefs.

Thanks for reporting back and if it happens again, and those techniques don't work, post back with steps and we will take another look.

Rich