So I'm attempting to paint hair over a Poser skin texture. I have a diffuse texture in a paint slot with a transparent background. I can paint black for the hair, save it out and combine it with the original texture to use in Poser. The problem I'm having is when I try to erase the black areas. There appears to be no erase tool. I've tried using "erase alpha" as a painting mode which seems to work in Blender but when saving the texture out (as a png) the black paint is still present.

The right side of the image shows the applied texture after I cleaned up the mustache. The left side shows the actual texture with the black paint still present. How can I erase paint and alpha at the same time as is done in Photoshop? TIA.

I will be honest and hopefully someone will chime in with more experience using the paint tools in Blender but I would do work like that with in Photoshop to do the fine tuning or Gimp and personally I work with TGA Targa files I have always run into problems with png alphas but that is my personal preference

Thanks Lobo. I've tried using Photoshop for painting directly on models. It works (kinda), but I found it unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. I thought I'd give Blender a try. It may turn out to be unsatisfactory as well. Bummer.

Hold down CTRL while painting to erase. Try with Accumulate both unticked and ticked to see which method works best for you. Ticked will erase as you'd expect, but unticked will slowly remove the color over multiple strokes.

Thanks Vaskania,

That's close but no cigar. The control key seems to toggle between foreground and background colors (in photoshop terminology). That's good to know. What I need is for it to erase to transparent. If I start with a totally transparent texture I can paint a color and both the color and opacity are added at once. I'd like to be able to erase color and opacity at once as well. Using Erase Alpha, the paint still exists in the texture though you can't see it in Blender. It's present in the actual texture on disk though and I don't see where a transparency channel is exported when opened in Photoshop. It's kind of a deal breaker as far as the workflow I hoped to use. I'm using v. 2.73 since I forgot to mention.

Oh, sorry.

Try setting the blend mode to Erase Alpha and mark Accumulate and see if that works any better.