If you need to quickly select an area of similar color such as replacing the sky or a green screen Magic Wand is your tool.

Activate Magic Wand by hitting (W) key or select it from the tool box.

Magic wand works by selecting similar colors in your photo, so if you have a photo of  a model in front of a solid color background you can use magic wand to automatically select and delete the entire background. Of course you might not always have the luxury to use a nice clean background so here are some tools to make your life easier.

Above is the first half of the magic wand menu. If one click is not enough to cover your entire selection you can use the add (or hold Shift while selecting), subtract (or hold Alt/Option while selecting), or create intersection(or hold Alt/Option + Shift while selecting) icons to help you expand and perfect your selections.

Tolerance value determined how much similar color Photoshop should pick up. If the object you are trying to select is fairly evenly toned you will only need to low Tolerance value to work, but if your background is poorly lit and has too much variation, you might want to go with a higher value. The only problem with setting high Tolerance is that you might end up selecting colors you do not need so it might be better to set the Tolerance low and use the Add/Subtract function.

Anti-Alias, it will make the edge of your selection a bit softer to create the illusion that the edge is smoother.

Contiguous selection will only select area that are connected. See the example below, I tried to select the white background with Contiguous on, it does not select the white background isolated by the pink heel and the black heel. If I turn contiguous off, it now selects the isolated area but also everything else that looks like the white background such as the highlight area on the heel.

Turning Contiguous off might save you a few click but you will also risk selecting areas you do not need, you are better off leaving Contiguous on and use the Add/subtract selecting technique discussed earlier.

By default Sample All layers is turned off, magic wand will only work off of the active layer, even though you can see the layer below magic wand will still ignore it. Once Sample All Layers is turned on, magic wand sample everything that is currently visible.

In addition to Tolerance, you can also change how much color magic wand will consider as similar by changing the Eyedropper sample size.

Select Eyedropper tool (I), under the option bar, choose a bigger sample size.

A 31x31 average means it will look at the closest 31x31 pixel area and use the average value of that entire area instead of sampling one color pixel. It will be useful if the object has a lot of tone/value variation.

You can refine the selection by expanding, contracting or softening the edge and even automatically retrace the edges using the Refine Edge Tool. It is available in most selection tool such as lasso or marquee, you can also find it under the Menu Select-Refine Edge or with shortcut Alt/Option+Ctrl/Command+R. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

More...SET UP - I use a photo that was shot using a consumer camera with flash, no professional lightning was used. The first thing that I did was delete the background, since my background is fairly plain, I just use the Magic Wand to delete them. You can access this tool on the tool bar or by pressing (W) on your keyboard. For photos that are more complex, you should use the pen tool. I also combined eraser tool and marquee tool to help delete the background.

SMOOTHING EDGES -The problem with using Magic Wand is that it leaves jagged edge, so you will need to smooth out the edge once you are finished. First start by selecting the empty pixels, you can use Magic Wand to do this or by Ctrl click the layer icon, it will select all the active pixel than inverse the selection. Than enter Quick Mask Mode, it can be found on the tool bar, the icon right below the color icon or by hitting (Q) on keyboard. Now you will notice everything that was selected is red and everything that is not is clear. Anything thing you do now will be reflected in the selection once you exit the Quick Mask Mode. Now go to filter-noise-medium and smooth out the edge than exit out of the Quick Mask and hit delete, now all the uneven pixel will be deleted.

BACKGROUND - The bacground is fairly simple, its just a series of filters and adjusting the color until you are satisfied.

LIGHT RAYS - To create the light rays that are shining behind her, first paint in some white in a new layer than use filter-blur-radial blur. Select the zoom option and hit ok. The white that you just painted now looks a bit more like light rays. However, light rays are usually broken up into tiny rays by the atmosphere or surrounding so lets break up the rays. Using the Quick Mask Mode again we will create a noised selection and delete that selection on our newly made rays than radial blur it again. You might not be able to see much now because the density of the pixel is low from all the blurring, you can increase density by duplicating the layer about 2-3 times, and don't forget to merge them when you are done.

I repeated the same steps for another set of ray that will be overlapping her. After finishing with this second set, clean it up so the direction of the light make sense.

HAIR - I want to create the illusion that my subject is underwater but she is in a standing pose and her hair is down so I will have to paint the flowing hair myself. First is paint brush to paint in blobs of hair, use the noise filter to create some white noise than smudge it out. If you want you can duplicate this and make it a light color so it looks like the light is illuminating the edge of her hair.

COLORS - You should use adjustment layers to correct the color so you can come back later to make more adjustment. Adjustment layers are located at the bottom of the layer pallet, It looks like a ying-yang circle. Ctrl click on the subject's layer and select the Level Adjustment Layer, by having a selection ready before you choose your adjustment layer, photoshop will automatically create a mask according to your selection, so now the adjustment layer only effect the subject and not the background.

FINISHING TOUCH - I've added some bubbles by duplicating them and went into liquify filter to to change her body, I didn't spend a lot of time on liquify filter but I will show you a more detailed tutorial on this later.

I hope you didn't have problem understanding it. If there is any part that you do not understand please let me know so I can change it or just any general comment and recommendation on how to improve on this will be appreciated. Thanks!