Quick Selection Tool and Magic Wand Tool

Shortcut-W.

I find myself using the Quick Selection tool quite often despite its imperfections. It has the advantage of being, as the name suggests, quick. Its icon looks like a brush and if you start painting with this brush inside of an object you will quickly select it. It helps a lot if the object has strong edges but even if it has soft edges (like a face against a reddish sky) it still behaves pretty well. Highly recommended for quick work or if you don’t know how to use other tools. Not recommended for precise selections.

The Magic Wand Tool is a nice little tool that has its uses from time to time. If you click somewhere in the image it will select all pixels in that area that have a luminosity level close to the luminosity level of the level you clicked. You can set this by entering a value in the Tolerance box (the Tolerance is situated in the tool option bar along the top of the screen).

In the image below I set the Tolerance setting to 2 and I clicked on the wall. Notice how ragged and ugly my selection is.

After I changed the Tolerance level to 20 and clicked on the same spot on the wall (after deselecting the previous selection) the selection is much better.

Also in the tool option bar is a checkbox that allows you to select noncontiguous areas (areas that are not connected) so if I click again on the same spot on the wall after removing the check from the Contiguous check box I would select both the wall on the left and right and generally every pixel with a close luminosity to the clicked area.