Two different jobs share one word
People who search for an image eraser want one of two things. Some want the thing they brush over to disappear and the picture to look as if it had never been there — a bin on a pavement, a sticker on a product, a date stamp in a corner. Others want a hole: the brushed area should become transparent, so the picture can be placed over something else, a corner can be rounded off, or a background can be cut away by hand. A tool that only does the first job leaves the second group with a white blob; a tool that only does the second leaves the first with a checkerboard where their pavement used to be.
This page opens the same editor as the rest of the site with one extra switch. Fill is the normal erase: the selection is refined, split into separate objects and rebuilt from what surrounds each one, by the local AI or by copying real texture. Transparent skips all of that and writes transparency straight into the pixels you selected — nothing is invented, nothing is grown, and every pixel you did not select keeps its exact value.
How the transparent eraser works
Each pixel in a PNG or WebP carries a fourth number, alpha, from 0 (invisible) to 255 (solid). Transparent mode sets alpha to 0 everywhere inside your selection. A hard cut can look jagged on a curved edge, so the panel has a feather from 0 to 4 pixels: within that distance of the selection's edge the alpha ramps instead of jumping, which is the soft edge a designer would paint by hand. The colour channels are left alone, so if you later use the Restore brush, both the colour and the opacity come back.
The stage shows transparency as a grey-and-white checkerboard, the convention every image editor uses, and the download dialog switches to PNG the first time you cut something out. If you choose JPG — a format with no transparency at all — the dialog says so and lets you pick the colour the empty area should become, white by default.
What it is not
Transparent mode erases exactly what you select. It is not a one-click background remover and it does not find the subject for you. For a subject-sized area, the quickest route is Smart Select: click the object, check the outline, then press Erase with Transparent on. For a thin cable you want gone rather than cut out, Wire mode traces it in one tap, and for text on a flat background the Text finder plus Fill gives a cleaner result than painting.
When Fill is the better choice
Fill is what you want when the picture will be used as it is — a listing photo, a holiday shot, a social post. It works best one object at a time, with the object's shadow included, and with a little of the background around it selected too. On regular textures such as brick or tiles it copies the real pattern instead of asking the AI to invent one, and the result bar tells you which engine made each result.