Exercise 5: Selecting with the Magic Wand

The Magic Wand (W) is a great tool. I use it often to select areas of color and other general shapes on the screen. It's a selection tool, but instead of drawing with it, you just click on parts of your graphics and depending what the tool setting are, it will do some auto-selecting for you. Let's try it out.

Let's open up a new window, 50x50 pixels or so, Transparent background. Using whatever tool you like, put some different color shapes in the window. Use a minimum of two colors, but repeat at least one of the colors in different non-connecting places. I made this:

In this image, you can see pink and two shades of blue that are relatively close to each other. Note: to make these circles, I increased the size of the pencil tip in the "Brushes" palette on the upper left of the Photoshop work area. I know I said to set it to 1 pixel in Part One of this tutorial, but every so often it's useful to use different brush sizes.

With the Magic Wand Tool set as follows:

Click on one of the Blue circles. All the circles of one color blue will be selected perfectly. If "Contiguous" were checked, it would only select one blue circle if you clicked on a blue circle. Contiguous essentially means "touching", "connected", "uninterrupted". If you click on the pink, it will select the entire pink area perfectly either way, since the pink is not separated by any other colors at all.

Contiguous turned On

Contiguous turned Off

Pink is all connected.The wand will select it all either way.

Now, if you wanted to select all Blue circles, even though they are 2 different shades, you can do this a few ways. I'll list four of them, just to show how once more how you can achieve the same results in many ways in Photoshop.

One way is to increase the "Tolerance" of the tool, so it will allow for greater range of a color. In this case it needs to be a tolerance of 22 or greater. Then the tool will select all blue circles, provided "Contiguous" is turned off. A Tolerance of "0" will mean only this one very particular color alone will be selected.

A faster way to do this is to use that same old "Add to selection" trick of holding "Shift" down while selecting, as we did with the other selection tools. Make sure "Contiguous" is turned off. In this case, select one color blue. Half of the blue circles will be selected. Hold down "Shift" and click one of the unselected blue circles. Now they should all be selected.

The same "Subtract From Selection" trick works with the wand as well. Holding "Option" on Mac, or "Alt" on PC, when you click a selected item will unselect parts of your selection.

A fourth way to do this that is good to keep in mind is making use of that Inverse Selection technique we used in Exercise 3 in Part One. In this case, I could select the pink area, Invert the selection, ("SHIFT" + "COMMAND" + "I" on Mac, "SHIFT" + "CTRL" + "I" on PC) and then all the blue circles would be selected.

Hide Active Selections: One more very helpful detail on selections: You can Hide Selections. If you have an active selection, and don't want to see it, press "COMMAND" + "H" on Mac, "CTRL" + "H" on PC. It will still be there, but hidden. Press that combo again to bring it back. I use this as often as I use selections almost. I also use the Deselect command frequently, which I mentioned in part 1. Mac: "COMMAND" + "D". PC: “CTRL" + "D”. Also, do this whenever something is not working that you're trying to do. Hidden selections can trip me up if I forget about them being active.

Introduction to Layers