HOW TO TAME THE SELECT SIMILAR COMMAND

A popular trick for making selections of large areas (such as backgrounds) is to select part of the background that contains most of the colors that appear within that background. Then you can go under the Select menu and choose Similar. Photoshop will then select all the similar colors in your image. This can really speed up the task of selecting an entire background, especially if the background is limited to just a few colors. Here's the tip: Do you know what determines how many pixels out the Similar command selects? Believe it or not, it's controlled by the Magic Wand's Tolerance setting. The higher the setting, the more pixels it selects. Eerie, ain't it? Sooooooo… if you use Similar, and it doesn't select enough colors, go to the Magic Wand tool, increase the Tolerance setting, and then try running Similar again. This all makes perfect sense (at least to an engineer at Adobe).