
Hold shift and you will see the icon change. To select all the background I now use the add to selection option. Tip: If you are not happy with your selection hit Apple + D (CTRL + D on Windows) to remove it and start again. You will see that at a tolerance of 60 it has selected some but not all of the background. I’ve selected the Magic Wand tool using W and clicked into the background. Select your copied layer to begin working on it. This is a good idea so you can recover the image if anything goes wrong. Knocking out the backgroundīefore starting you should copy the Background layer. Use all layers - this allows the tool to select from all layers.Contiguous - this selects only areas that are joined together.Anti-aliased - This defines a smooth edge to the selection.The number you will need depends of the image but I find 60 is good for general work. 255 will select everything whilst 1 is very precise. Tolerance - This determines how closely to match colours in the selection.Intersect with selection - this means that each time you click only areas that overlap with the existing selection will be selected.Subtract from selection - this means that each time you click your selection will be removed from the existing one on the screen.Add to selection - this means that each time you click your selection will be added to the existing selection on one the screen.New selection - this means that each time you click a new selection will be made.

The Magic Wand tool is primarily a selection tool so you will see the same options that you get in the Lasso and Marquee tools: This is a common task in Photoshop and one that is simple with the Magic Wand tool. In this example we are going to remove the background of a picture. Select the Magic Wand tool by pressing W.

It works by selecting pixels based on settings defined by you.
