Adobe Photoshop CC Magic Wand Tool
The Adobe Photoshop CC Magic Wand Tool is a wonderful tool and one of the selection tools that is the most easy to use. There are a couple of things that you have to understand before you can use it effectively.
The basic premise is that you want to select something. Usually I’m trying to select a background and get rid of it so that I can use a person or thing in the image. If the situation is right, you can just make a click or two and then hit delete and you are in good shape, but only a few times in your lucky life will life be that easy.
The more and more I create book covers, the more and more I am selective about what images I choose to work with. I want to get the job done. I buy images for copyright reasons, and use the people or the things that I need to put into the images. I can look at an image ahead of my purchase and my mind will tell me, “This is an easy one. This one is difficult, but we can do it. This one will take lots of time and effort. Forget it.”
The Adobe Photoshop CC Magic Wand Tool selects “stuff” by similarity in color. For instance, if you have a person sitting in front of a red wall, and the floor is gray, then that would be pretty easy. You click on the wall and delete. Then you click on the floor and delete. Then you might have to clean up some little dots here and there, but you’re done. That’s easy.
If you have someone standing in front of a flower garden with lots of colored flowers, shading, leaves and other things, this is not the situation for easy use of the Magic Wand Tool. That’s a time when you turn to another tool.
In the first image below, we have a woman with a solid white background. This is an easy one. One click in the white background, click delete and I am ready to go.
The second image below is not easy. The woman has many different colors behind her and they are all in very small groups of color. This would take all day to get the job done.
This would be a job for Quick Mask or the Polygonal Lasso tool. You could always use the eraser tool. There is no one way to get the job done. Different designers would use different tools.