Some of you are going to think less of me for saying this, but I actually use the Magic Wand tool on a regular basis. I know it’s considered something only a total newbie would do, but I really don’t care because it works. At least for what I use it for, which is knocking out background.

Whenever I shoot against a white background, I usually end up with some gradients and grey toning, and after having tried and tested many techniques for isolating my subjects, I’ve found that a combination of the Magic Wand and a curves adjustment layer is both fast and efficient.

Here’s how I do it: After raw processing, I open the photo in Photoshop and select the Magic Wand. I set its tolerance fairly low, usually around 11 or so, and click on the background. Depending on how much grey there is, I may have to add more to the selection by shift-clicking in the darker spots. Once I have the background selected, I do a little fine-tuning using the Lasso tool (to deselect things like a white collar on my subject’s shirt, that accidentally got hit by the wand). Once I have a good selection, I apply a slight feather to it. No more than 2 pixels.

Next, I create a curves adjustment layer. It will automatically use my selection as a starting point and if needed, I can manually paint bits and pieces in or out of it later. By dragging the very top right point (the white point) about a quarter of the way to the left, I eliminate any grey areas in my background. And in a non-desctructive way to boot, since it’s all in a seperate layer.

All of this takes me in the neighborhood of a couple of minutes. The better my starting point, the less tweaking I have to do, obviously. Nothing beats a photo that was lit and exposed perfectly right from the start. I only use this technique on photos that were shot against a white background, and for that it works almost like magic.

Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.

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