Leveling Up In Photoshop

I recently had the pleasure of witnessing, first hand, someone "level up" in Photoshop. I have always been a firm believer in the learning process consisting of a series of "plateaus", much like the leveling system for characters in just about ever computer game available these days.

As the ad hoc resident guru on all things computer related, I began with a brief discussion of their current level of understanding. After that, I simply began to demonstrate casual use of the application. By merely watching the way that I worked, she was able to deduce several new abilities and add them to her design repertoire.

It was fascinating to witness, I must say. What I take for granted as habitual casual use of a program contains years of learned responses that can each be correlated to various "abilities" associated with it.

Just like that, after months of struggling to learn the intricacies of Photoshop, she earned a new "plateau" of skills associated with Magic Wands...

Lesson? Don't neglect to stop in and check with your class trainer periodically, else you wind up missing the fundamentals necessary to ply your trade successfully.

Keep reading for a breakdown of the Magic Wand skillset under the Photoshop path specialization of the Designer class. ahem.

The Magic Wand is one of your most powerful weapons as a designer. It allows you to select a broad swath of your design based on color similarity to the original pixel that you click. Ergo, it lets you select an "area".

This, at first, is of only marginal use, and introduces an aspiring designer to the true dynamics of the design tools in a fashion that is curious but unremarkable.

However, your Magic Wand is a versatile tool full of surprises. The key to unlocking it's secrets is to alternately include either the Shift-key or the Alt-key. The first allows you to continue adding areas that you select to the existing selection. Clicking out towards the edge of an existing selection will expand it. The Alt-key, however, allows you to modify an existing selection by removing area from it, also based on proximity to similary based pixels.

Therein lies the true control within the Magic Wand. All of it's functions are altered based on the number set for the "tolerance". This figure represents the degree to which adjacent pixels must match the color of the one selected. A very large number causes a correspondingly larger area to be selected. A very small number causes a correspondingly smaller area to be selected.

The final skill imparted during the "leveling up" process that I witnessed was use of the "Feather Selection" option. This essentially softens the selected area through the use of an alpha-gradient at the edges (it "fades" at the edges).

The previous level was the one so many of us remember; one fraught with zooming in to erase or select individual pixels in an effort to capture only specific parts of an image.

Someone should write a book for the Design class that spells out the abilities available at each level. It would allow aspiring designers a chance to follow a well-laid path to leveling up, and the rest of us a way to measure our abilities against those of our peers.

After all, isn't it about time that a way was found to separate the wheat from the chaff in the design community?