Adobe Photoshop – Graphic Design and Photo Editing Tips

I usually use the eraser, which is not the most effective method. Magic wand doesn’t seem to work right. Is there some sort of settings for this?
Please help.

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One Response

1. amybeader Says:
   July 13th, 2010 at 9:32 pm

   Use one of the other selection tools. The magic wand is often far from helpful; it works best when there is a solid or nearly solid color background and good contrast at the edges. The other selection tools are the Lasso, Magnetic Lasso, Polygon Lasso (the Magnetic and Polygon lassos are under the Lasso tool, click and hold on it to see them), and the Pen tool.

   If you use the Pen tool, you can create a very precise path around the object (if you’ve ever used the Pen tool in Illustrator it is very similar). The Pen tool will create a Path, which will be visible in the Paths palette (often right behind the Layers Palette, there’s a tab at the top labeled Paths, if you don’t see it go to Window>Paths). You will be creating lines and anchor points each time you click. Work your way carefully around the shape, clicking where you go. You will be able to grab and alter the positions later. When you get to the end, click again where you started to complete the path. Now go to the Path selection arrow. You may see a solid arrow in the tool palette, if so, click and hold, it will show you the direct select arrow (hollow arrow). select that tool. Now you can click on anchors individually to fix your path as you need to. This will take some practice.

   When you are satisfied, at the bottom of the Paths palette there is a dotted circle icon (the dots can be a little hard to see) if you click on that, it will convert the Path to a Selection and you will see the familiar “marching ants”. Now, if you want to remove the background, leaving just the object go to Select>Invert Selection. The marching ants will now be around the background areas, and you can hit delete (backspace on a PC) to delete that background. Or you can use the Background Eraser or Magic eraser (they are under the Eraser square in the tools palette, click and hold to see them).

   If you want to just move what you’ve selected to a new image (assuming you have one open), rather than inverting the selection, click on the Move tool in the top of the tools palette, and click and drag your selection to the new file. Photoshop will copy the selection to the new file, putting it on it’s own layer.

   If you want to copy this selection to a new layer within the same document, you can hit Control +C (on a PC) or Command (Apple key) +C on a Mac, then create a new layer (easy way, go to bottom of layers palette and click on the little square icon with the folded corner), click on it in the palette to select it and Control + V (or Command +V on a Mac). You can now move the image around on the layer if you want.

   When you are done with doing whatever you needed to do with the selection, hit Control (Command) + D to deselect the selected item. The marching ants will go away.

   Note that in the Paths palette, you can turn your selection back into a path if you want. You will see an icon at the bottom that looks kind of like a circle with dots and two lines coming off the sides. That is the Make Selection into Path.

   Hope this information was helpful. =]