Inside Photoshop® CS

Magic Wand Tool Magic

The Magic Wand tool is great for selecting areas containing similar colors. You should know a few things about this selection tool first to produce the best results. This section helps you figure out how the tool works and then do some cool stuff with it.

The first fact about the Magic Wand tool is that it's not magic (surprised?). Until now, all the selection tools we have used involved either closed shapes or lassos that surround the area to be selected. The Magic Wand tool acts a little like dropping a stone in a calm pool of water. The selection, like ripples of water, spreads outward from the starting point. It continues radiating outward, selecting similar (and adjacent) colored pixels until it reaches pixels whose ...