76. Select Areas of Similar Color Before You Begin  70 About Making Selections
See Also  73 Draw a Selection Freehand
75 Select an Object by Tracing Its Edge 77 Paint a Selection
If you want to select an area of your image that is a consistent color, instead of tracing the area, you can use the Magic Wand tool to select it. For example, you might want to select a red rose, a blue balloon in a crowd of balloons, or all the green grass in a picnic image. Using the Magic Wand tool, you can click a pixel that matches the color you want to select, and Photoshop Elements finds all matching pixels around your selection. When you click a pixel in your image, PhotoShop Elements evaluates that pixel's color and then finds all surrounding pixels that match that color based on the Tolerance setting you specify in the Options bar. For example, if the Tolerance value is low, only pixels that are very similar to the color you click are selected. Specify a higher Tolerance setting to select more pixels in that color family, such as the shadows in the petals of a red rose or variations in the green of the picnic grass. 1. | Select Magic Wand Tool
TIPS  | If your goal is to select all the blue balloons in a photo, disable the Contiguous option, and Photoshop Elements will select all the blue balloons (along with any other blue pixels, of course). If you enable the Contiguous option, only the blue balloon in which you initially click is selected; all others remain outside the selection. You can select all pixels in a layer with an opacity of 50% or higher by pressing Ctrl and clicking the layer's thumbnail in the Layers palette. To select all pixels, regardless of their transparency, choose Select, All from the menu bar. |
Open an image in the Editor in Standard Edit mode and save it in Photoshop (*.psd) format. In the Layers palette, select the layer that contains the data you want to select. Select the Magic Wand tool on the Toolbox.
| 2. | Set Options
Set the desired options for the Magic Wand tool on the Options bar such as Anti-aliased. Click the New Selection, Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection, or Intersect with Selection button as desired to create a new selection or add to an existing one.
Set the Tolerance value for the selection by specifying a number between 0 and 255. Enter a low value if you want to include in your selection only those colors that are very close matches to the pixel you'll click in step 3. If you want to broaden the selection, increase the value of the Tolerance field.
Enable the Contiguous option to ensure that only pixels adjacent to the pixel you click are selected. If this option is not enabled, all pixels in the image that match the selected pixel will be selected.
 If you want to base your color selection using all the layers in the image, enable the Use All Layers option. Otherwise, Photoshop Elements makes the selection using only the pixels in the current layer.
| 3. | Click Desired Color
Click the desired color on the image. Photoshop automatically selects all other pixels that match the selection based on the Tolerance and Contiguous options you have specified.
Make changes to the area within the selection, copy or cut it to another image or layer, or delete the data. After you're satisfied with the result, make any other changes you want and save the PSD file. Resave the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers (if any) intact so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want. In this example, I wanted to select the deep-red rose. Because I planned to use the selection to change the rose's color from red to coral, I increased the Tolerance setting to 200 to include as many of the varieties of red as possible. After I clicked a medium red on the edge of the front petal, note that, even with the Tolerance set this high, there are still areas of the rose that fall outside this color selection. If I want to select the entire rose, I'll have to increase the Tolerance setting and click again to broaden the selection even further.
TIP | You cannot use the Magic Wand tool with a 16-bit color image. If you want to use this tool, you must first choose Image, Mode, Convert to 8 Bits/Channel from the menu bar to convert the image to 8-bit color. |
After I have selected the entire red rose, I can use the Enhance, Adjust Color, Replace Color command to replace the red of the rose with a lovely coral color, or perhaps a golden yellow. As an alternative to recoloring an object with the Replace Color dialog box, you can use the Color Replacement brush, as described in 182 Make a Photograph Look Like Andy Warhol Painted It.
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