Wand

The “Magic Wand”, has been an automatic selection tool in Photoshop from an immemorial time. This does not mean that it is always the perfect tool for the selection you want to perform.  Personally I find this tool useful if your image has a plain background, like in the picture below, or if your image is in a large surface with a similar color.

The “Wand” tool selects contiguous pixels of the same color tones.

When the “Wand” tool is selected in the tool bar, we find a number of options in the options bar.

• Tolerance: Allows you determine the similarity between the selected pixels.
  if you enter a low value, it selects only colors that are very similar to the pixel you clickick on.
  Enter a high value to select pixels with a wider color range.
• Anti-Alias: You make a selection with smoother edges.
• Contiguous: If this box is selected, you will only select the adjacent areas using the same colors. If this box is not selected, all pixels of the whole image using the same colors are selected.
• Samples all layers: to select colors that uses data from all visible layers. Otherwise, only the colors in the active layer are slected by the magic wand. But more about “layers” in the next lesson.

Another tip.
We now know when we select by means of “Wand” tool, the color is selected, depending on the tolerance that we enter in the “Tolerance”. We can also determine this with the “Eyedropper” tool.

Select the eyedropper tool in the tool bar and click the downward pointing arrow next to the “Sample Size” box. It is this value that the wand relies on.

Default is set to “point”, which means a pixel, which also means that the wand relies on a pixel, the one on which you click.

Now, when you change the sample for example “101 by 101 Average”, it means that the dropper will also rely on the 100 adjacent pixels. So the magic wand can also rely on the 100 adjacent pixels.

So you increase the sample size of the dropper and click somewhere in the picture with the “magic wand”, then the selected area is significantly greater, without you having to change the tolerance.

In the picture below you see the selected area with a sample size of “Point” (1) on the left and also the selected are with a sample size of “101 in 101 Average” (2).

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