Performing Wand Wizardry in Photoshop

The Magic Wand. The name is intriguing, isn’t it? Any tool that has the audacity to call itself the Magic Wand must be so powerful that it can grant your every selection wish with a mere swoosh. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so awe-inspiring. A better name for this tool would be the Click-’n-Select tool. You click your image, and the Magic Wand tool makes a selection, which contains areas of similar color, based on the color of the pixel you clicked.

Simple enough. What’s not quite so simple is how to determine how similar the color has to be to get the Magic Wand tool to select it. That’s where the important Tolerance setting comes in. Before you tackle tolerance (and find out how it affects the Magic Wand tool’s performance), you first need to get the hang of using the Magic Wand tool.

Selecting with the Magic Wand tool
As with the Magnetic Lasso tool, the Magic Wand tool works best when you have high-contrast images or images with a limited number of colors. A black-and-white checkered flag is a perfect example of something that the Magic Wand tool effectively selects. I click once on the top of a black square, and the Magic Wand tool picks up all the other surrounding black pixels. I can now easily change the color of my black squares to red or yellow in one fell swoop.