Magic Wand

The Magic Wand tool allows you to select regions of your image based on color. You can think of it as a combination of the selection with the Bucket Fill tool.

After creating a selection with the Magic Wand, you can move or delete it like any other selection, making this a quick and easy way to make parts of your image transparent.

Unlike other image editors, the selection is part of the active layer. Right-click on it and convert it to a layer if you want to use Magic Wand similarly to other programs.

Fill Modes

Much like the Bucket Fill tool, you can choose how the Magic Wand selects pixels.

Contiguous

This is the classic "flood fill" mode that finds pixels of the same color in a contiguous (touching) region bounded by pixels of different colors.

Bounded

In this mode, all pixels within a region surrounded by the foreground color will be selected. This is useful for selecting specific shapes; just draw around the region with the Pencil tool first, and then click anywhere within it to select all pixels within.

Note that in order for this mode to function properly, there must be a properly enclosed region. If there are any gaps in the border color, the entire image will be selected instead.

All

In this mode, all pixels of a given color will be selected, regardless of their position in the image. This is useful for quickly replacing a color.

Fill Directions

Flood fill algorithms can check either 4 directions (up, down, left, right) or 8 directions (the previous 4 plus diagonal variants). Thus, setting the directions to 4 will only allow the fill to "flow" in the 4 cardinal directions, while setting it to 8 will allow the fill to flow across diagonal boundaries as well.

Tolerance

The Tolerance value specifies how exactly the color must match. It is a value from 0 to 255, with 0 indicating an exact match only.

In Contiguous and All modes, the tolerance specifies the maximum difference between the color initially clicked and the surrounding colors. Since real-life photographs usually have some variation in "smoothly colored" regions, setting a slightly higher tolerance will help fill the entire region in one click.

In Bounded mode, a higher tolerance allows a less-exact bounding color match, at the cost of filling less pixels within this region. Note that setting the tolerance too low here may cause the entire image to be filled if an appropriate bounding region is not found.