You might have heard about the magic wand tool which is definitely a stunning tool to remove backgrounds from the images. Since this tool is the most used, we would like discussing it to make the process easy.

Magic wand tool offers you the easiest way to select and mask certain areas of an image in order to remove the backgrounds. Plus, it doesn’t affect the remaining areas and only removes the selected parts. To improve the overall appearance of an image to be used on ecommerce platforms or other websites, magic wand comes in handy. It selects an area of solid color within an image whichever you want to delete and then removes all the similar color from the background.

Here are the steps to use the magic wand tool effectively:

  • Open the image in Photoshop and go to the Photoshop toolbar to pick magic wand tool. You will see that the cursor will change to a magic wand which is used to click on the areas you want to remove. By clicking, the area gets selected which you can remove after adding more similar areas or if an extra area has been selected, there is an option to subtract it from the selection. The selection is based on the color properties of each pixel so be careful while selecting.

Magic-Wand-Tool

It is important to do some settings after the tool is selected to make sure it works right. For that, there are 4 options which control the way how magic wand tool performs.

  • Tolerance: It is the number to select how closely you want to choose the color to remove from the background. This is between 0 and 255, the more the value, the more area it will select to remove. If you choose 0, the magic wand tool will select only the color that is exactly the same which you have clicked on. Putting 255 in the value will select the whole image which might not be of any use if the background is of different colors. Make the tolerance somewhere around 20 to 30 to get the results right.
  • Anti alias: This is to smooth the jagged edges of a selection. It softens the color transition between the background pixels and edge pixels. When you cut, copy or paste the selections, this is useful.
  • Contiguous: It is the option to select only the pixels with suitable color information which are directly related to the original selection.
  • Once you have made all the settings, you can use the magic wand tool easily. All you need to do is click on the area you want to remove and press Delete. If there are multiple colors in the background, you have to click separately to remove those areas because single selection will not remove the whole background altogether.

Magic-Wand-Tool-settings

I hope you understood the process pretty well. This is fun using Photoshop tools for different issues and as you use them, you will discover many new things. If you happen to do anything wrong, press Undo button to undo the last step! Have a good day.