The Magic Wand tool is great when you have a selection area that has the same color. This can be great for removing the sky from an image or anytime where you have a solid color that you need to select. Let's take this image of a jellyfish and drop out the background so that we can change it out with something else. You can click on the Magic Wand Tool in the toolbar or enter the keyboard shortcut W. Before you get started, if your item has smooth edges, select Smooth Edges from the tool settings menu before making your selection. To make your selection just click on the background, and while holding down the mouse drag the mouse to change the tolerance of the selection. This will make the selection smaller or larger by changing how much tolerance you have from the initial point you clicked on.
In the following screenshot, the blue color in the background was clicked on to select most of the background. You can increase Tolerance here to include more of the blue color:
If you have the need to select part of an image that is all in one uniform color, this can be done with a quick click. This is very helpful if you photograph something against a very plain wall that has the same color and you need to remove that background. First click on Edit | Select Color. Your cursor will change to a magnifying glass and you can select any color. Here you can see that I am selecting the skin tone of the child's face as follows:
After you have selected the color, use the Radius slider to change Tolerance of the selection. As you slide this left and right, you will see the image change to black and white to give you a preview of what part of the image will be selected. The white parts will be included in the selection and the black parts will not, as shown in the following screenshot:
Often, with the use of the Magic Wand tool you still might have to refine certain edges. Say you have a person with frizzy hair and are using the Magic Wand to select the background. There might be some minor details in between the hair strands that you will want to manually refine. This is where quick masks come in and following is a quick step-by-step guide to use the Quick Mask mode.
- After you make the initial Magic Wand selection, go to the Tools submenu and click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode button. This will turn on a mask that shows the unselected parts in red. You can also get to this mode by clicking on the keyboard shortcut Q.
- Now switch over to Brush and use a fine point brush set to white and paint on the red sections that you want to include in the selection. If you make a mistake, don't worry. You can change the color of the brush from white to black and paint back over to bring back the red overlay.
- When you are in the Quick Mask mode, you can zoom in very close on your image to make very detailed selections. Once you are done, just click on the Edit in Quick Mode button in Edit again to go back to the normal selection view. Also you can edit using the Quick Mask mode in any selection tool and not just in the Magic Wand tool.