Adobe Photoshop Tutorials

The magic wand tool and how to make it simple to use in adobe photoshop cs2.

If you want to select a particular colour or range of colours quickly, then the magic wand tool is normally the photoshop tool to use for job. All you have to do is simply click in your image, picture or pixels that are similar in colour to the one you clicked on will be selected.

The magic wand tool isn’t as precise as alternatives such as the colour range in photoshop, but it can do a very good job of selecting relatively areas such as a light blue water or a grey dark sky.

There is a secret to using the magic wand tool correctly, and to get the best results is to get the tool options bar settings right. The tolerance setting is the most important of these, you will have to alter this a few times before you get the pixels your after.

The Magic Wand Setting The setting for this come in 5 settings – Tolerance – Anti Aliasing – Contiguous – Layers – and Low tolerance setting.

Tolerance controls the range of colours that will be selected by the tool – higher values mean a wider range of colours will be selected.

Anti Aliasing smoothes the jagged edges of a selection by softening the colour transition between edge pixels and back ground pixels. This will help you make the changes blend smoothly with unaltered surroundings.

Contiguous, only the pixels adjacent to the ones you click on will be selected. By unticking this option, similarly-coloured pixels throughout the entire image will be selected.

Layers, this means that the pixels from all the layers in a multi layered image or picture will be selected.

Low Tolerance settings, always start with a low tolerance setting, then hold down the (shift key) or choose “add to selection” and click repeatedly until you have selected all the pixels you need.