I've done this before and I've experienced it before but darned if I can remember how to get it going right. So... I need to erase a shadow behind a person. So, I used the magic wand to get started, then entered quick mask edit mode. Used the eraser (or the brush) to add to the selection. It looks ok with the marquee around it but when I cut pixels, it leaves some gray where it was selected and should have cut to white. You can see what I mean by the example of the shoulder. I know it's something easy that I'm missing and I've looked in my "Classroom in a Book" in the right chapter but I can't find the answer there. The brush is set at 100% opacity, and flow at 100%. And the brush setting is at "normal". Like the book says. But, for some reason, it's not "cutting" all the way through (not sure how else to say it). So, I gotta get this to the boss tomorrow. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Chuck is it leaving behind some of the shadow? Or it is taking to much of the shoulder with it? If you use the hard edge brushes then it "should" give you a clean edge. Normally any residue is left because of "anti-alias" if you use the keystroke shortcuts the increase/decrease the brush tip you could zoom in your mask to make a better edge.

The keystrokes to increase or decrease the tip size and edge are the "bracket" keys:
} = increase tip size
{ = decrease tip size
shift + } = increase hard edge
shift + { = decrease hard edge (softer blur)

Let me know how you're making out with it,

:)
retrocity

It is possible you locked the transparency of your layer (or it is still called 'background'), which causes your erased selection to be colored with your background color. Hitting the '/' does lock/unlock layers. And double clicking a background layer makes it a regular layer that will become transparent when deleting.

Hoofdcommissaris... well, I tried moving it off the background (and putting a white layer underneath it) but I had the same results. retrocity... you can see (have to look close) above in the sample image, the person stood in front of a wall and a person snapped the photo with a flash. This, of course, left a slight shadow on the left side of the photo. That is what I was trying to remove. In the example, if you look closely, you can see where I tried to select (and delete) that thin shadow behind the shoulder. You can see, even though the marquee showed the shadow completely selected, when I deleted it, it left a slightly dark color where it used to be...like it only selected 95% of the area in the marquee while 5% was allowed to "stay". As you can also see, just as a test, I dragged the brush (or eraser, it didn't matter) down into the shirt area. Flipping out of quick mask mode, the marquee showed portions of the shirt now included in the selection area. So, I clicked delete and you see, not everything got taken away. The photo was pulled in (JPG) and edited right on its layer (background). As I said above, I tried moving it off the background by duping the layer, inserting a white layer between them and then deleting the bottom layer (the original photo). Still, the same leftover area.

From my experience, when you are using the quick mask mode to select an object, paint what you want to KEEP not delete. When you delete what was painted it will leave the shadow you are talking about. When you paint the object you want to keep, when your object to remove is selected, it should clear, back to the grid, or white. I don't know if this fixes your problem, but it was the only thing I know of that would cause that shadow to appear like that.

could it be as simple as having the foreground and background colours right?