Starting to Work / Magic Wand
Subtitles of the Movie
(The) magic wand is another kind of selection tool that selects areas of similar color which you click on. So you can see I have these guys in their blue outfits here on the field, and with the magic wand tool selected, I am just going to go into one of their outfits here and click on it. And you can see what it has done. It has selected an area of color. Now what it does is it looks at this number, the tolerance up here, and says look at this number which is 32. And what that means is that whatever pixel I click on, look for 16 values above and below for the difference, and include that in the selection. So you can create a tighter selection by lowering the tolerance number, or a much broader selection by increasing the tolerance number. I will try it again and click over here. And you can see, I now have a new selection. I can add to the magic wand selection by holding down the shift key and moving outside of my selection and clicking again, and you can see it is beginning to add to this selection. So I am just clicking to add - there I finally got all of it. Notice that when I did that selection, I had the contiguous option selected. And what that means is that the selection will be contained to that area's color. If I de-select contiguous and click again, what it does is it looks for any color that I clicked on in the image to select. So now it is not contained; it's going out and looking for that same color throughout the entire image and beginning to select that. So I'll hold down the shift key again and start to add to my non-contiguous selection. And you can see, it's doing a pretty good job actually. Finally if I had a layered document, I could have the magic wand look at whatever (X,Y) pixel coordinate I clicked on through all the layers. So it wouldn't matter which color I had currently selected or targeted. Like the other selection tools, I can choose to use these different adding and subtracting options. These are also available as keyboard commands. If I wanted to create a new selection, I would leave it in the default selection icon here - new selection. So that means, whenever I click again, it will turn off the current selection and create a new selection. But if I wanted to add to this selection, I could click on this icon. And now notice that my magic wand tool has a small plus next to it. Meaning that the next time I click, it will add to the selection. Notice it seems to be getting this flag area here. I might want to take that area away from my selection. So I will choose this option right here, and that is subtract from selection. And notice that my magic wand now has a small minus symbol next to it. And the last one is intersect the selection. Of course, I always use the keyboard shortcuts to temporarily turn my magic wand into an add selection magic wand. And that is to hold down the shift key. And the way I remember this is, that the shift key adds capital-ness to capital letters. Holding down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on the PC, temporarily makes my magic wand a subtract selection magic wand. And holding down both the Option key and the Shift key gives me the intersection of the selection. If you have a selection active in an image like this, you might want to use one of the options under the Select menu. Select menu>Grow will go out and look for similar colors using your current tool's tolerance. So I will try Select menu>Grow and it should add more blue. And it seems to have done that pretty well. If I had created a selection using my contiguous option, so here is my selection - another option I have under the Select menu is similar. And what it will do is basically the same thing as if you had disabled contiguous. It will go out and look for similar colors of this selection throughout your image. Select menu>Similar, and you can see it's done that pretty well.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop 6 |
| Author: | Andrew J. Hathaway |
| SKU: | 33189 |
| ISBN: | 1930519206 |
| Release Date: | 2001-01-01 |
| Duration: | 13 hrs / 129 lessons |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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