Meet the Players.....

Open the wand exercise image, if you need it click the link and it will open in new window then RIGHT CLICK and choose COPY and then PASTE AS NEW IMAGE in PSP, it is also on the resources page. Click the control palette and you will see that the options for the wand are a little different than they were for the lasso and the regular selection tool.(Fig.1) Click the arrow beside the options under the "Match Mode" text. A menu will expand. (Fig.1) When the RGB mode is selected, it will select pixels based on the amount of Red, Green and Blue in the image. For Hue it uses the position on the color wheel of hues. With Brightness it selects pixels based on the amount of WHITE they contain. When ALL Opaque is selected it selects only areas that contain pixels, meaning it selects NO TRANSPARENT portions of the image. With Opacity, it selects pixels based on the opacity of the current pixel. Tolerance is just that, it controls how much of your selection it grabs, the higher the setting the more colors it grabs, if you have a high tolerance and select white, it is likely to also select any light greys, blacks etc. Lower the settings and it only selects the white. We discussed feather on the previous pages if you need to review it please feel free but that basically controls the sharpness of the edges of your image. Sample merged, when checked, applies to all layers of the selection, if you have 4-5 layers and a selected area then anything you do to that selected area will be applied to ALL LAYERS, uncheck the box and it is applied ONLY to the currently active layer. Click the second tab and it shows the precise cursor and the show brush outlines option. These are personal preferences and don't really apply to this tool.

Next back in the control palette, set the match mode to RGB and set the tolerance to aobut 5 or so. This can vary from person to person but use 5 as a starting point. DO NOT check sample merged and set feather to 0. Then click the green circle, set your background color to HOT PINK so that is what we will see when we cut something out, you should see the marching ants around your green circle. (Fig.3) then choose EDIT and THEN CUT. Your circle should now be HOT PINK if you set your background color to pink like me told ya too <G> BUT, don't ya hate that word? ROFL BUT if you look closely you can still see some green around the edges of your pink right? (Fig.4) That is because we had the tolerance set low. Let's try again, this time turn up your tolerance to 10, set the background color to black and click once in your red square. You should then see marching ants around your red square. Now choose EDIT and then CUT again and most of the red should disappear. More than the green did anyway. But there is still some red showing.(Fig.5) As I said the amounts that are removed may very from one persons computer to another so you may have ALL of your red gone, if not keep playing with the tolerance until you get the number that removes ALL of it for you.

I had to keep going and for my blue triangle I set the tolerance to 150 and set the background color to yellow and it finally them took all the color I selected on the blue one. (Fig.6)

There are a couple other options available in the selections menu. You can see them if you click the text menu at the top of PSP, Choose SELECTIONS and then the list will expand. I will give you a brief explanation of them and you can play around with the different ones on the same image we used above if you like. Some of yours may appear to be unavailable to you, grey out, this is because for some of them to work you have to already have a current selection or another condition upon which will activate the selection option, for instance the defringing only works on a FLOATED SELECTION, a floated selection is a selection that has been floated, it is completely different from a regular selection, with the floating you still leave the original portions of the image selection in tact becuase you will be working on a FLOATED selection layer. Clear as mud fer ya? ROFL