How to Use Magic Wand Tool in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended

So I am going to close this image out and I don't want to save any changes and I am going to double-click the background to get to the Open file dialog box, or on a Mac you can got to the File Menu and select Open. And let's open up a file For the Magic Wand, specifically For the Magic Wand.jpg and hit Open. This is sweet shot of Rockefeller Center in New York City. Now you could imagine going around the old Rockefeller Christmas tree here with selection tools would be quite the pain. There are a lot of little intricate lights here and branches and stuff. This would be a not a very fun one to select. But what we can do is use the Magic Wand Tool which selects by color. Let me show you how this works.

I am going to go underneath the Quick Selection Tool which is an absolutely amazing new tool; we are going to talk about in just a few minutes. I am going to hold the left mouse button down, get the fly-out and select the Magic Wand Tool, and all we have to do is click and de-select that black background and all of a sudden it searches for black until it finds different shades.

So apparently even though I can't see that big of a difference here Photoshop saw enough difference between this black and this black, it just stops and made a line there. And that's what the Magic Wand Tool does by default. It finds colors within a certain tolerance and when it finds different colors it just stops there. But we want to add this to our background. So what we can do is use the same keyboard shortcuts, we learned in the last segment and apply them to the Magic Wand Tool. So I can hold the Shift key and look at my Magic Wand. Has a little plus there. I am going to add colors to it. So I could hold Shift and click that area to add that black to our background, very nice. Up here there is a little freak. Ah be gone with you. See now it sticked a little bit too much. So we can go into this area now and hold the Alt key or subtract and click away on these areas. Very cool!

And as you could see it's a little bit of a challenge. I actually clicked one shade of black too much and now we have this huge area that's not selected anymore. So we have to go back and forth selecting and unselecting all these different areas, and that's why I am so grateful for the Quick Selection Tool which will talk about next, but it really works better, the Quick Selection Tool does, if you understand the core concepts behind the Magic Wand Tool first. So here's the area of black that I want to select and here is an area of black I want to select.

Let's go back and fix this area up again. There we go. Now we have a nice selection of this black background. Now what I am going to do is hit my Paint Brush Tool and I could just go ahead and scribble through this. But again only what is selected is altered. So I am only painting on this black background not on the tree and not on 30 Rock. So we have this crazy, swirly background, it's actually getting me kind of hungry. It looks like a little chocolate with a little white icing on it. It looks pretty delicious.

Now if I hit Ctrl+D we will see that our image is actually untouched and the background is kind of fiddles away. Kind of an interesting thing to do. Now if you look really closely you will see some weird jaggedy edges, some black edges along our selection here and it happens a lot with the Magic Wand Tool. Well, we have a lot of new tools inside of Photoshop to fix problems just like that. We will talk about that a little bit later on in this very same lesson. But in a nutshell that's the Magic Wand Tool, it selects by color and not by shape which could really come in handy.