Make majestic scenes with the Magic Wand
Get to grips with this powerful selection tool and learn how to craft a composite image by adding a lone tree to a landscape.
The Magic Wand is one of Photoshop’s best selection tools, especially if you need to target an area of an image that is uniform in colour or tone, like the backdrop to the bonsai tree image here. The tool works by seeking out similar pixels to the point that you click on, so it can be a huge help while you’re creating a fantastical composite like this, or for any time when you need to quickly lock on to part of an image.
Making a successful selection in Photoshop is often mostly about choosing the right tool for the job. There are lots of great tools to choose from: the Quick Selection tool, the automated Object Selection tool, the spookily brilliant Select Subject command. The latter two employ fancy new AI to seek out the subject, but there’s still a place for the good old Magic Wand.
It comes into its own with an image like this. Our aim is to remove the original backdrop to the bonsai tree, including all the small gaps and little spaces between the leaves. We can set the Magic Wand to seek out a specific range of pixels image-wide, so we can lock on to all those fine details with a couple of clicks, before refining the selection and masking it to remove the backdrop.
Making a successful selection in Photoshop is often mostly about choosing the right tool for the job.
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THE MAGIC WAND TOOL The Magic Wand is found in the Tools Panel alongside the Quick Selection Tool and (in Photoshop CC 2020) the Object Selection
Tool. Click with the tool over part of the image, and it will look for pixels that are similar to the point you clicked on. You can set a sample size in the dropdown at the top. Point Sample uses a single pixel, while the other options let you sample from a wider area.
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ADD, SUBTRACT, INTERSECT Like any selection tool in Photoshop, you have the option to Add, Subtract or Intersect with your initial selection. Add is especially useful with the Magic Wand: often you need a few goes to complete the selection. It’s better to set Tolerance low and click a few times than to set it too high, then have to backtrack. Hold Shift and click to Add, Alt to Subtract, and Shift-Alt to Intersect.
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SELECT AND MASK It’s always a good idea to run an intricate selection through the Select And Mask command. Within the command, you can use the Quick Selection tool to add to or subtract from the initial selection, then use the Radius setting to improve the edge. Once done, you can set Output to Layer Mask to convert your selection to a mask, thereby hiding the backdrop in a non-destructive way.
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TOLERANCE This setting lets you determine how similar pixels can be to the sample point to be included in your selection. Set Tolerance to 1, and only pixels that have the exact same RGB value as the sample point will be included. Set it to 100, and the range of pixels becomes much wider. Experimentation is key to getting the best result. Here, a setting of 30 lets us target the backdrop without picking up the details in the tree.
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CONTIGUOUS The Contiguous box has a big impact on how the Magic Wand behaves. With Contiguous ticked, the selection is limited only to pixels that are connected to the point first clicked on. This makes it useful if you want to isolate a uniform block or shape, but less so with an image like this. By keeping Contiguous ticked here, we tell the tool to look image-wide for similar pixels, allowing it to pick up all the isolated little gaps between the leaves.
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SELECT SUBJECT This impressive command employs AI to recognise the subject and isolate it for you. It’s not always perfect, but it’s often a useful starting point for a selection. Here we can begin by using the tool to select the tree for us, then perfect the selection by using the Magic Wand to seek out all the gaps between the leaves that have been missed. If you need to quickly lock on to an object, Select Subject is usually a good place to begin.