How Does The Magic Wand Tool Work

So how does the Magic Wand Tool work? I have some examples of what the Magic Wand Tool is good at doing. First of all, the Magic Wand Tool is located up here on the toolbar and you may not see it right away but in this case, I see the quick selection tool first, so I’m going to right-click on that and there is my Magic Wand Tool.

What Does the Magic Wand Tool Do

But first, what does the Magic Wand Tool do? Simply put, the Magic Wand automatically selects an area on your image based on its color and tone. When you click on a pixel, the Magic Wand finds another that it detects as a match so the best usage of the Magic Wand Tool is a photo like this where you have a solid background and it’s all one color. But the Magic Wand Tool has features that you can actually make selections jumping between shapes with a feature called Contiguous but the Contiguous option is not checked because we want our selection to select this blue shade everywhere it is in the image. If we click Contiguous and click on our image, you can see that the selection stops at these branches. I’m going to deselect with Command + D and I am going to uncheck Contiguous.

Remove Background In Photoshop With Magic Wand Tool

Before we actually get into making a selection here, I wanna point out the sample size. Now, you can use a sample size of Point Sample, three-by-three average or a five-by-five average depending on what you wanna do. In this case, since we’re wanting the Magic Wand Tool to select a large area, it will be good to do a sample size of five by five because you’ll see that you can actually work with the sample size and tolerance at the same time but selecting the good sample size, we can just use the tolerance for a lot of our work here. So what the tolerance value is gonna let us do is select more of a color that we first click on and tolerance can go from zero to 255. 255 is the broadest range of colors that it will select over the image so if I click now, it selected the whole image all the way around. So the lower the tolerance, if you wanna select more specific colors or a specific color in the image, adjust the tolerance until you see how your selection is going. So if I click an image now, it did a fairly good job at 78 but it’s still a lot. So I’m gonna deselect, Command + D. I’m going to bring this tolerance down to something like 30. For some reason, 30’s a good starting point for a lot of images when using this tool. So if I click in the image, and we zoom in a little bit, you can see that around the bird, and around the branches and even in the middle where the dead tree has rotted away here, you could see where you have a selection. All the way through. So this is what the Magic Wand Tool is good at. So now what we can do is I have a layer below and that is a sky layer. So if I come down here to add a layer mask, and now I need to invert my layer. It’s Command + I, so now we have our sky. So here you see if you zoom in, you can see where the new sky has come through all of these little holes in the tree. That’s how good the Magic Wand works in this case.

Best Magic Wand Settings

So as I showed you with Contiguous, Contiguous sets only adjacent areas using the same colors, otherwise, all the pixels in the entire image using the same colors are selected. Then we have an option up here called Anti-alias or Anti-alias and so that just creates a smoother edge selection so that we’re just gonna leave that option turned on. So in a nutshell, that’s the adjustment at the top that you can pretty well stay with when you going to be using the Magic Wand in this particular scenario here. So here’s our selection. If we hold down the Option + Command, here is our layer mask. Alt + Option puts us back to the image. We hold down Shift and click, here’s our image before. Here’s the after so now we can go on to another example.

Magic Wand for Changing Background Color

This image is a little bit different even though it’s a solid color background. The color on the right-hand side is darker. Then on the left-hand side there seems to be some light coming from the left. So let’s see how the Magic Wand handles it. So my settings are five-by-five average sample size, Tolerance, 30, Anti-alias is checked. Contiguous unchecked. Sample All Layers, unchecked. I’m gonna click with the Magic Wand Tool and you can see that it did not select enough of the image and even if I hold down the Shift key and click to add more to the selection, it eventually selects all of it and we don’t want that. The selection goes all the way around. I don’t know if you can see that. I’m going to deselect. Command + D and I’m gonna bring my tolerance down because I want the Magic Wand Tool to select less of a color when I first click on it and then I will add to the selection with the Shift and click. So there’s my first selection. I’m going to Shift and click. And keep on adding. Clicking around. Clicking into different areas. So that looks pretty good right now. Okay, and I’m gonna change this background layer to a regular layer. What we’re gonna do is bring in a hue saturation layer and see what we can do about this background. So in the Properties of the hue saturation layer, I could shift the color of the background. And see this is again what Magic Wand Tool is good at, the selection jumped through all the bike frame, the spokes in the wheel. It took color on the right-hand side that was darker down the right-hand side and it made the determination what to select just by, in this case, lowering the tolerance so that we had tiny bits of selections of color as we clicked across the image and finally, we clicked all the way through and everything’s selected. And it didn’t do a 100% perfect job. There’s still some area over here on the floor behind the wheel. When we first brought this image in, you can kinda tell that there’s a cast, like a color cast of the color on the wall, basically under the floor a little bit. So we could fix that if we wanted to. You can get down there with the mask and adjust that but here we are. This is what the Magic Wand Tool is good at.