The Magic Wand

There are only a couple of things that people get confused with when dealing with the Magic Wand.  The first thing to learn is what the Tolerance does.  I'm going to explain it in my words.  If you don't want the wand to pick up way too much in your image, then keep the Tolerance number low.  See the butterfly below with a Tolerance of 10?  How about with a Tolerance of 60?  Whoa!  I only wanted to delete the drop shadow, not parts of the butterfly!  So:

The lower the number, the less the wand will select.  The higher the number, the more the wand will select.

Have you ever been working in layers and went to use the wand and had it select around objects on other layers?  That's because you had Sample Merged checked.  Uncheck that if you only want a selection on the one layer.

How about Feathering?  Here is the first clock selected without Feathering.  Let's try Feathering at 5.  See how the Selection is now 5 pixels within the brown of the clock?  Ok, hit Delete.  It doesn't totally delete 5 pixels of the image.  It softly deletes a little of the edge and blurs/softens 5 pixels in depth.

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