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.

By default it 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. Set Source to All visible and it reads every visible layer instead.

What the wand reads#

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. A Pixel layer is read from its own bitmap too, so paint that has grown past the page edge can be selected. Every other layer type has no single bitmap to read, and a 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.

Options#

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.

With Contiguous on, the flood spreads through directly connected pixels and stops at the first edge outside Tolerance. Turn it off and every pixel of a matching colour is selected, wherever it sits.

Source decides what is read: the active layer, or every visible layer as the canvas shows it, which is how you select a region bounded by line art on another layer. Anti-alias gives the selection a soft one-pixel edge, so a fill or a stroke inside it meets the surrounding pixels without a visible step.

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 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.

A moved, rotated or scaled layer works too: the selection lands where the pixels are drawn on the canvas.

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.