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 31×31 average means it will look at the closest 31×31 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.

Why use a Pen tool to draw or make selection? Because it gives you better control and higher precision that other tools cannot give you.  

Pen tool can be intimidating at first but once you learn it everything you touch with have a more professional look. You will get a clean and accurately outlined selection on all your photo. A pen path can also be saved within a .jpg file for use with other software!

Activate the Pen tool with the Tool Box or hit P on your keyboard.

Click and Drag to create your first point, you will see two Direction Handles once you start dragging, they control the curvature on either side of the control points, and this is NOT the actual path. Your path will appear once you make the second click.

Hold Alt/Option while you are dragging if you need a sharp corner, or go back to a previously created handle and hold the Alt/Option key(note that your mouse icon turn into a > shape) than drag the handle around, a sharp corner will be created.

If you’ve miss placed the anchor and need to move it around, Hold the Ctrl/Command key than drag an anchor point. Notice the mouse icon turns to a black triangle in the picture below.

Clicking anywhere on Line will add point; you will see a plus sign next to your pen icon.

Clicking on existing anchor point of delete it

Clicking the first anchor point again will close the curve, you will notice a circle appears next to your pen icon.

Holding Shift will snap to handle angle of 45 degrees angle

After you break the handle you can still have the handle on both side move relative to each other by holding Ctrl/command and alt/option at the same time.

Use Direction Selection Tool or A on your keyboard to select your path after you are done.

Ctrl/Command & Alt/Option click on the anchor point will reset the curve handles.

Types of Path – You can create Create Shape Layer (first Icon on top) or Path (second icon). If you set it to Shape Layer, you will be able to access the Shape through the layer pallet, you can change the color and opacity of this layer as you would with any layer items. If you set it to Path, you will need to look for it in the path pallet, you will be able to save your path in your .jpg and use it a selection to outline objects in your photo.

If you select Path option you can add Shape and subtract shape using these icons. The third icon is for intersection, so your second path need to intersect the first for this to work. Or you can exclude the intersection only with the last icon.

Softer selection, under the menu in path pallet, you can set feathering to soften the selection edge.

After you created your selection wit the Path tool you can use the Refine Edge tool to create a even more accurate selection. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is pretty much the basic of the Pen tool, if you have any other tips about the Path tool please share it with me in the comment, thanks!

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