4.6 The Magic Wand

All right Photoshop users, you're going to be excited for this one, something that you've heard of before. The Magic Wand palate and tool. Now it's not really something that you can see when you go to window right away because it's tucked between so many other important things like layers and navigator. And it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. But open up the Magic Wand pallet and in fact let's show stroke options and show transparency options. Just so we can see the fuller range of tools you get with Magic Wand. And grab the Magic Wand tool. So Magic Wand is pretty simple. When you select something with the Magic Wand, like one of these circles in the cloud, it's gonna find everything else that matches the same properties in the scene, or similar properties, and it's gonna select them. So let's click on the circle, and let's look at what it grabbed, okay. So it grabbed highlights of all the beach balls. It grabbed the white circle in every single beach ball. It also grabbed the semi-transparent kind of fog, cloud cover up here. And it grabbed all the clouds. Well that's pretty useful if we wanted to say make all the white in this scene pink or what have you. Cuz you can really quickly find and replace things. But what if you said, and you know, I really just wanted the clouds. Well, I can say let's be specific about our opacity here. I want you to only tolerate something that is 1% more or less opaque. Now let's select the clouds and you can see we get the clouds and the beach balls. Right? We don't get the shine cuz that's see through. We don't get the fog because that's see through. And now we can very quickly. Edit all those. Now that is pretty good. We can also grab say the strokes in our smiley face here. Oh, wait, it grabs everything that's just lines. So the birds and the sun, or the sun's face rather, are all selected. Well, that's where we can say Stroke Color so on and so forth. We'll drag down stroke color down to five. And you can see we only get the sun's face. Now the nice part about fuzzy selections, and we'll make a new document so you can see, is that they work pretty well. Let's take a bunch of circles, and we're going to make this one, super blue, we're going to make this on a little bit not the same blue and we're going to make this one an even different blue. These are three different blues. If we take fill color here. And it's at 32 when we select one, no good, but if we bring that up to, say, 185, all of them get selected. You can slide this around and test which gets selected. Looks like these two are within 90 of each other, but this one's not. Let's see 110. Yeah, that gets them all. So that fuzzy selection matters. Now that's also basing it off of just the fill color. You can have these three objects have three completely different stroke colors. And when you go to select them, it's really still gonna get, all of them, as long as your fill color's high enough. If you had stroke color on too, it becomes more specific. Or if you had stroke weight on, and not stroke color. They're all the same weight, so it still works. Finally, you can do blending modes and opacity as well, but that's essentially all the stuff that you need to know about the magic wand palette. It's pretty easy. But very powerful for selecting different things. And you're seeing without the need to go around holding shift and selecting this and selecting this and selecting this. So that's magic wand. Check it out. Use it all the time.