foreground vs background colors??

Hi

Can someone please explain to me the concept of foreground and background colors? The default settings on the color chips are black and white respectively. Does this have anything to do with transparency settings? i.e pure white is opaque and pure black is transparent? If so , why is the foreground regarded as transparent and the background as opaque?
I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fundamentals here.

thanks in advance

angus

If you deleate an area and dont have transparent background activated, the area is replaced with the background colour, the foreground colour is your working colour.

Angus...

If you paint or add text it gets added in the current foreground colour. The background colour is more relevant to gradients, fills and erasing.

Colin

would i be correct in saying that the background color is your canvas color and the foreground color is your paint colors? and the reason why black and white are chosen as defaults is becasue they are opposing neutral values i.e black is complete absence of color and white is all colors RGB added together? and they are used for doing mattes, keying etc is because black represents no color therefor transparency and white represents all colors therefor opaque...

I guess I'm trying to figure out what the "universal theory" is between photoshop and after effects etc and foreground vs background colors and their relation to mattes and keying.

angus

yes you are correct about canvas and paint, as I said in post one.

I dont know why black and white where chosen, but i geuss they had to pck two colours, why not them? could be a more technical reason, if so i dont know it.

I create many files with masking, I also create taga files with masks, some have white as transparent, but some have black, it depends how you are using the file, some of my transparent Targa chanel files are Blue, for chroma key.

mattes and keying

I do a lot of this for photo booths, for me what demands the colour is the software that has been written to accept these files.

I dont know why black and white where chosen, but i geuss they had to pck two colours, why not them? could be a more technical reason, if so i dont know it

Probably historic based on digital image research years ago when masks were composed of strictly black or white pixels.

Or how about simply because black and white are the only colours available in all non-indexed colour modes?

deebs,

Probably a little more basic than that... Black ink white paper.

I think you may have hit the nail on the head there PH. I feel dumb now.