Magic wand tool not working - selection disappearing

[iand84000286]

Hi

I have photoshop elements version 10. It has always worked fine. However, today I have noticed that the magic wand tool is not working. I have to cut out a lot of images from white backgrounds. Usually I use the magic wand tool, set the tolerance at 32 with anti-alias and contguous ticked. Once I have got rid of most of the background I then zoom in, change my tolerance and get rid of the rest. What is happening now is that I make the first click, zoom in, change the tolerance and make the second click. The cut out "marching ants" then disappear completely around the rest of the image and I'm just left with the second click I've made. Basically it is not remembering my first selection.

I don't know if this is anything to do with it, but I'm also getting a message up on opening the file (most of them are .tif files) that "this document uses an unsupported colour mode" and it asks me to convert it. It's giving me this message even with images I have previously downloaded and used without getting that error message.

Do you have any idea why I'm getting this problem. It was working fine last week! Any help would be hugely appreciated as I'm tearing my hair out here!! Thanks so much.

[hatstead · Accepted solution]

iand84000286  wrote

Hi

I have photoshop elements version 10. It has always worked fine. However, today I have noticed that the magic wand tool is not working. I have to cut out a lot of images from white backgrounds. Usually I use the magic wand tool, set the tolerance at 32 with anti-alias and contguous ticked.

Double click the background layer in the layers palette to convert it from a locked layer to a regular layer.

Then left click with the wand to select the background, and hit delete on the keyboard.

If this does not fetch small residual areas, reapply the wand and do it again. Adjust tolerance as needed.

iand84000286

I don't know if this is anything to do with it, but I'm also getting a message up on opening the file (most of them are .tif files) that "this document uses an unsupported colour mode" and it asks me to convert it. It's giving me this message even with images I have previously downloaded and used without getting that error message.

Go to Image>Mode and be sure that RGB color is checked.

[iand84000286]

Thank you very much for your answer about the magic wand. I didn't know you could do it this way and this solved my problem.

Re "unsupported colour mode", I did check and it defaults to RGB colour mode for all images, so still not sure why I'm getting up the message about this, especially when it has never happened before. The only other thing I have changed is my browser - I got rid of chrome because it was causing me major issues and am now using firefox, but I cannot see how this could be causing this problem.

[hatstead]

You're welcome. Glad to help.