Magic Wand tool
Click a colour and get a pixel selection of everything like it, on whichever layer is active: a raster cell, a vector drawing, or the composite.
The Magic Wand (W) is a click tool: there is nothing to drag. It floods outward from the pixel you clicked and turns the matching area into a pixel selection, drawn with marching ants, exactly the kind of selection the Marquee makes.
It always samples the layer that is currently active. It never falls through to some other layer's bitmap, which is what it used to do when the active layer was not a raster one.
| W | Magic Wand tool |
| Click | Apply the combine mode set in the Tool Options bar |
| Shiftclick | Add to the selection |
| Altclick | Subtract from the selection |
| ShiftAltclick | Intersect with the selection |
What the wand reads
| Active layer | What is sampled | Where the flood stops |
|---|---|---|
| Raster Cells | The visible cell's own bitmap | The edge of the cell |
| Shape, Vector Cells, Pixel, Group, Image | That layer alone, rendered on its own into a canvas-sized image | The canvas edge |
| Nothing selected | The composite: every visible layer, as the canvas shows it | The canvas edge |
A Raster Cells layer owns a real bitmap with a declared size, so the flood runs inside that cell and the cell is the boundary. Every other layer type has no single bitmap to read, and a Pixel or vector layer has no fixed extent at all, so the wand renders that one layer into a canvas-framed image and floods that instead. World coordinates then line up with the sample one to one, which gives the outer boundary for free: click empty space and you select the page minus the artwork, click the artwork and you select its silhouette.
Tolerance
| Setting | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Tolerance | 0 to 100% | 16% |
Tolerance is how far a colour may differ from the one you clicked and still count as a match. The comparison is made channel by channel, alpha included, so a colour has to be close on all of them. At 0% only an exact match is picked up; raising the value widens the range in every channel at once.
The flood is always contiguous: it spreads through directly connected pixels and stops at the first edge outside Tolerance. There is no non-contiguous option.
Combining selections
The Mode dropdown in the Tool Options bar, Replace, Add, Subtract or Intersect, decides what a plain click does. Holding Shift, Alt or Shift+Alt overrides it for that one click, the same modifiers the Marquee takes.
Mode is shared between the Marquee and the Magic Wand, the way Photoshop shares it: the combine mode belongs to the selection, not to one tool, so setting Add once keeps applying whichever selection tool you pick up next.
Editing the selection afterwards
The wand carries the same mask-editing block as the Marquee: Expand, Inset, Feather, Invert and Deselect. A wand selection can therefore be grown, softened or inverted without switching tools first, and it combines freely with marquee selections because both write the same mask.
The mask is not limited to the canvas. A Pixel layer that has grown past the page edge can be selected out there too, and a previous selection is kept in the same mask when you combine, rather than being clipped to the page.
Undoing a wand selection
Each wand click is its own history step, whether it replaces the mask or adds to, subtracts from or intersects with it. Ctrl+Z restores the previous mask exactly, and History labels the step Select pixels, Modify selection or Deselect pixels.
When nothing happens
- You clicked outside the bounds of the sampled image, on a raster cell smaller than the canvas for instance.
- The active layer is hidden or locked, so there is nothing editable to sample.
- No pixel matched, in which case the selection is simply emptied.
Beyond Shift and Alt the wand has no double-click behaviour and no snapping. Right-clicking with a selection live opens the pixel-selection menu.