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Question

How to select only a single color with Magic Wand

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
April 7, 2017
3 replies
5905 views

In the attached image, you can see a selection made of the arrows, and the settings at the top, using the Magic Wand tool.

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However, it's select the entire arrow. I'm trying to only select the black section of the arrows, not the gray outline pixels.

I thought setting a tolerance of zero, no anti-alias, and point sample would accomplish that. However, it's still including the two grays around the edge of the arrows.

How can I only select the blackest portion of the arrows?

thanks

doug

This topic has been closed for replies.

Eternal Warrior

Inspiring

The grey pixels are part of an anti-alias to make the arrows seem smoother.

You could try enabling contiguous (and disable anti-alias) when using the magic wand with tolerance set to 1 or 0.

Or more simply you could use > Select > Color Range...for future reference as this gives a lot of finer control when you just want to select a specific colour or range of colours:

Or finally as FelixTuts pointed out you could simply make your arrows in illustrator... but without knowing the end goal or your workflow there are exceptions where only Photoshop is likely required.

Best,

EW

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I'm a bit confused here as the thread is going off at all sorts of tangents. The OP is asking how to select just the black pixels, rather than how to create an arrow that has no anti aliasing. He could make a vector arrow in Photoshop the same as with Illustrator, but even viewing at 100% there is still a hint of aa, and if you zoom in, the aa becomes very obvious. So EW's question is highly relevant. What is the end goal here?

A

Anonymous

You are working with a pixelbased workspace, if you don't want to have gray-pixels inside of your arrows. Consider using Illustrator instead of Photshop.

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

The trouble is that you have transparency, and the magic wand is just looking at color. The gray sections my look gray, but they're actually black with transparency. I you want to make a selection of just the black, merge the arrow layers with a layer filled with white. Then you will have true shades of gray, and the magic wand can tell them apart.

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