Figure 1 below shows the magic wand tool Options bar.įigure 1 The magic wand tool Options bar.
There are better ways of going about doing this, and these are explained in Chapter 8 of the book.
In short, don’t dismiss the wand completely but don’t place too much faith either in its capabilities for professional masking tool. I rarely ever use the magic wand when defining critical outlines, but I do find it quite useful when I want to make a rough selection area that's based on color. Color Range provides all the power of the magic wand tool, but offers much more control. If you are going to create complex selections this way then really you are often better off using the quick selection tool or choose the Select Color Range option, which can also be used to create selections based on color values. However, you can use the smoothing options in the Select menu to tidy up a magic wand selection. I find the magic wand tool works OK on low resolution images but that is about the limit of its usefulness. That’s what most people expect the magic wand tool to do but in reality it does not always perform that reliable a job. For example, if you have a picture of a landscape with a blue sky and click in the sky area with the magic wand tool, it should just select the sky. The magic wand tool can be used to select pixels on the basis of their luminosity values within the individual color channels that make up the composite image.