Selecting Translucent Pixels

I have a bunch of images that have pixels with various levels of translucency. But I have to create a selection for these pixels, and I need the selected pixels to be 100% opaque, and not retain the levels of translucency for each pixel.

For example, here is a picture with lots of translucent pixels.

If I select the pixels (Mac: Command-Click on the Layer Icon), it looks like all of the pixels are selected.

But the selection includes the level of translucency for each one of those pixels. Look what happens when I try to fill the pictures on a new layer:

The pixels are greyed, instead of solid. It's great that Photoshop is so intuitive that it can retain the translucency for every last pixel, but can I select the pixels at 100% without going through the lengthy process of doing this with a lasso tool?

Thanks!