Magic Wand

The “Magic Wand”, has been an automatic selection tool from the immemorial time to perform automatic selections in Photoshop.

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

Another tip.
We now know when we select by means of the “Wand” tool, the colors will depend upon the tolerance that we have entered in the “Tolerance”. We can also use the “Eyedropper” tool for this.

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

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

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

Do you follow? Of course.

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

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

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