Selecting Areas by Their Color


So, would you select an entire solid-blue sky using the Rectangular Marquee tool? You probably wouldn't. Oh, you might use a combination of the Lasso and Rectangular Marquee tools, but even then it could be somewhat of a nightmare (depending on the photo). That's where the Magic Wand tool comes in. It selects by ranges of color, so instead of clicking-and-dragging to make a selection, you click once and the Magic Wand selects things in your photo that are fairly similar in color to the area you clicked on. The Magic Wand tool is pretty amazing by itself, but you can make it work even better.

Step One

©SCOTT KELBY

Open a photo that has a solid-color area that you want to select (in this case, it's a red door). Start by choosing the Magic Wand tool from the Toolbox (or press the W key). Then, click it once in the solid-color area in your photo. You can see that much of the door is selected, but probably not all of it (because, although the door is red, there are all different shades of red on the door, caused by shadows and bevels. That's why this is such a good examplesometimes one click is all it takes and the whole object will be selected, but more often than not, you'll need to do a little more Magic Wanding to get the full door).

Step Two

As you can see here, the first click didn't select the entire area (you can see all sorts of little rectangular areas that it missed), so to add these areas to what you already have selected, just press-and-hold the Shift key, and then click on those parts of the door that aren't selected. Keep holding down the Shift key and clicking on all the areas that you want to select until the entire door is selected (don't select the two door handles of coursejust the red parts), as shown here. It took about 15 Shift-clicks with the Magic Wand for me to get this entire door selected.

Step Three

Now you can use the Adjust Hue/Saturation command (Control-U) to change the color of the door, just like you did in previous techniques, by dragging the Hue slider until the door looks the way you want it. Press Control-D to deselect and see your final change.

TIP

If you click in an area with the Magic Wand and not all of that area gets selected, then deselect (Control-D), go to the Options Bar, increase the Tolerance setting, and try again. The higher the setting, the wider the range of colors it will select; so as a rule of thumb: If the Magic Wand doesn't select enough, increase the Tolerance amount. If it selects too much, decrease it.




The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers
The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers
ISBN: 0321384830
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 201
Authors: Scott Kelby

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