The Quick Selection and Magic Wand tools (W) allow you to click an area of color to create a selection based on adjacent pixels and your Tolerance setting.
The Magic Wand is a much older tool that works reasonably well on photos with large areas of similar color. The Quick Selection tool is a significant improvement over the Magic Wand tool, however, and has quickly become a favorite tool of Photoshop pros.
Using the tools
The Quick Selection tool allows you to create a selection that quickly forms based on color and contrast.
When using the Magic Wand tool, you have several options available in the Options bar that can improve or alter your selection. These modifiers are very similar to those for the Marquee and Lasso tools, so I’ll cover them briefly.
The first four icons specify the kind of selection:
- New selection
- Add to selection
- Subtract from selection
- Intersect with selection
The remaining settings allow you to refine your selection parameters:
- Sample Size: This determines how additional pixels are selected. The targeted color value can be based on just the color you click on or an average of neighboring pixels.
- Tolerance: This setting determines how similar the pixels must be to your initial click in order to be selected. You can enter a value in pixels, ranging from 0 to 255. A higher value selects a broader range of colors.
- Anti-alias: This creates a smoother edge when you click.
- Contiguous: When Contiguous is selected, only adjacent areas with the same colors are selected. If deselected, all pixels in the entire image that use the same colors will be selected.
- Sample All Layers: If you have a multilayered document and want to select colors on all layers, select this check box.
- Select Subject: This feature allows you to, with the click of a button, automatically select the subject in your image.
- Select and Mask: This button provides options to make precise selections through tools like the Refine Edge Brush.
