Magic Wand

This tool is used to make selections based on the tone and colour of pixels. It’s a very flexible and useful tool and is great for selecting irregular shapes such as skies, flower petals or parts of buildings. To use it, simply click on any part of your image and a selection based on the tone and colour of the selected pixel will be made . The precise nature of that selection will depend on the settings in the Tool Options bar. These options are shown in the graphic and text below.

Tool Options

A: Scope of the Selection

This section is explained in the Masks page at the beginning of this module.

B: Sample Size

This determines the area which is sampled by the Magic Wand. The dropdown offers the following choices:

• Point Sample – this will sample a single pixel at the precise point where you click.
• Averages  – this will sample the average of pixels surrounding the point where you click. Several choices of increasing size are offered.

I always use Point Sample.

C: Tolerance

Enter a number between 0 and 255. This determines how precisely colours and tones are selected. With a very small number, say 10 or less, only pixels which are more or less identical in colour and tone will be selected. As you increase the number, more and more pixels will be included in your selection. The trick is to set as high a number as possible which doesn’t select pixels you don’t want to include in your selection. I find that a value of between 20 and 30 usually works pretty well.

D: Contiguous

If this is ticked, then only pixels which are (more or less!) connected to the point where you click will be selected. If it is unticked, then all pixels throughout the image which have a similar colour and tone will be selected.

E: Sample All Layers

If this is unticked, then Photoshop will only use pixels in the active layer to create the selection. If it is ticked, the pixels from all visible layers will be used.

Using the Magic Wand

• Select the Magic Wand from the toolbar.
• Set the Tool Options as you wish. In most cases you will choose ‘Add to Selection’ as it’s almost certain you won’t be able to select the entire area in a single click!
• Click on a pixel containing the colour and tone of the area you wish to select.
• Continue clicking on other unselected pixels until the selection is complete. You can alter the tolerance setting at any point. Remember: if any click results in your selection going horribly wrong, press CTRL Z to undo the last move!
• Use other masking tools as required. The lasso tool is particularly useful.

Example

The example below is a small section of a still life of vegetables. The image had already been edited in a number of ways. I felt the stalks of the tomatoes in the shot were too dark. My intention was to create a mask of the stalks so that they could be lightened. 

First, I selected the Magic Wand tool with a Tolerance setting of 50 and contiguous unticked. This is the result below of a single click on one of the stalks. As you can see , the stalks of the carrots and a couple of other areas were also selected.

The unwanted areas of the selection were easily removed with the lasso tool using ‘Subtract from Selection’.

The stalks themselves are only partially selected at this stage so the next move was to complete the selection using both the Magic Wand and the Lasso tool. A feather of 1.2 pixels was applied in the Select and Mask dialogue.

The final selection below was saved as an alpha mask.

With the selection active (to ensure that only the masked area was affected), two adjustment layers were added:

• A Curves layer was adjusted to brighten the stalks.
• A Hue/Saturation layer was adjusted to change the hue by making the greens slightly more yellow and to increase saturation by a very small amount.

The finished result is below. Move the slider on the left middle to view the Final and Original versions.

 

 

Marquee Tools

Colour Range