Transcript:
Welcome back to the studio. My name is Mike. Pinkett, I’m a graphic designer with over 20 years experience and today we’re gonna take a look at the Magic Wand Tool inside of Adobe Illustrator. So this is your first time here. Go ahead and hit that. Subscribe button that way. You don’t miss anything. This series is 30 illustrator videos in 30 days. Today, right now is November 19 and next to do some batch filming over the weekend. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, so you’re stuck basically with me For the next 30 days, learning Adobe Illustrator Day by day so today we’re going to take a look at the Magic Wand Tool. Now I think the magic wand tool is probably one of the most underrated and underused tools in Adobe Illustrator. It’s one of those things that we use quite a bit in Photoshop, But I think it just kind of got lost in the shuffle inside of Adobe Illustrator. Nobody thought this magic wand could really work for selecting vectors when you go through the tool. I’ll show you a couple of different uses for it. How to change the settings on it? It’s a tool that I’ve started using more and more in my workflow and I think you will too once you understand more of what had to use it. So let’s hop an illustrator and get started, all right, so instead of Adobe Illustrator? I have opened up a file that I downloaded from Vector Z. I put a link and attribution to this file down in the show notes or in the description. So if you want to go download this and maybe follow along, you can pause it here. Grab the file and then just work with me. Otherwise, it’s just attribution because it is a free file so to get started now as we all know what the Magic Wand is a selection tool, It’s one of those things that you can use and it really does get useful like. I said once you understand kind of all the options that you’ve got so to access the magic wand. I’m gonna go to the tool bar over here on the side. It’s the little blonde with the three little stars around it and I’m gonna click on it. You can also use the keyboard shortcut. Y on your keyboard and from here, basic selection, I’m just gonna say, let’s grab this green, so it’s grabbed every green that’s on this screen and it’s grabbed only that same color of green. If you see, I want to, let’s go, Let’s say select inverse, and then I’m gonna go and go command three to hide everything else so you can see. This is what we initially selected was just the green color. Let me unhide everything. Option Command 3 to unhide everything that we’ve hidden and let’s do the yellow so again just to show that we’ve done nothing, but the yellow. I’m gonna inverse my selection under the Select menu and I’m gonna go command three to hide everything so again all we’ve done now is just selected all the yellow on the screen option command, three to Unhide, and I’m gonna double click on the icon itself and by double clicking on it. I get this little magic wand flyout. That gives us different options that we can change inside of here. Now you see that right now? I got a tolerance set up to about 32 and what we can do here is. We can actually use this to select different shades or different tones in the same colors, and if you look. I’ve actually selected this blue here. It’s it’s a really deep blue, but you see that we’ve actually selected more than just that blue. So let me zoom out here again. I’m gonna go command zero and then command negative a couple of times, and if I hide, let’s go inverse again, so let’s go select inverse and now command three to hide everything. So you see, it’s more than just that initial blue that I clicked on. It’s actually picked up kind of this. This green here. Let’s look at lets. Just grab this one, and we’re gonna look at what color we actually have here. Go down here! I’m gonna double click on this and you can see that we have so a CMYK of 84 5839 and 18 and then here’s our hue. Saturation and brightness is all in there. And if you notice this, so in web color, so this is pretty close to what this is. Which is why our tolerance of 32 picked up both of those colors. So let’s make a quick change here. I’m actually gonna click on the little flyout here next to tolerance, and I’m gonna put it down to zero or option Command 3 to unhide everything again, and I’m gonna go and grab my magic wand one more time and let’s grab that same blue. Hey, select inverse and 3 to hide, and now what we’ve done is selected Just the blue, so you’re changing your tolerance on the fill color. It’s gonna select colors within the same color wheel or color spectrum, and if we want to change that if we want different attributes, we have other options that we can go through here, so let’s unhide everything. Now, if we’re looking at this so fill color, here’s my other option. I can go stroke color. We don’t have any stroke on any of these, so lets. Just grab a few here. I’m gonna grab this green. I’m gonna grab this orange and I’m just holding down shift while I’m grabbing different colors here and this blue. Let’s grab a couple of dots here and I’m gonna go up here. I’m actually gonna put on just a white stroke. Let’s say 5 or 6 and we’ll go 5 so you can see now. We’ve got all of these different shapes that we added that white stroke to and now with the white stroke. I can go stroke color. I’m gonna knock this down right to 0 so that I don’t about tolerance on it, even though I don’t have strokin or anything else. But a high tolerance. It could just pick up everything without that. I’m gonna go. Why keyboard shortcut for my magic wand? And now I know this one’s got a stroke on it, so I’m gonna click on that one, and we’re gonna go select inverse command three to hide now that one. Lets let’s back up here. Second Ghost Command Z, and I’m actually gonna shift and click on my background layer so that it doesn’t disappear. So select inverse should already be there and three, so we hide everything else and you can see there’s everything that we put a stroke on now selected inside of our design, so our other options here again, stroke weight, and if you leave more than one, so if I were to leave all three of these checked, I would actually be selecting the same fill color, same stroke, color and same stroke weight, So let’s say, let’s make another quick change here and go here. I’m gonna put this one up to 15 I’m gonna bring this one down to 3 so I want to show you something here. Let’s put this one up to 10 well. Knock this one down to 1 OK, so again, why let’s option Command + 3 to unhide everything and I’m gonna select none. All right, so lets. Select this orange one here. No, you know what, let’s go over here. We’re gonna go to this one. We’re gonna select that same green again and just real quick. So I can show you so. This one’s got a stroke fill of green and a stroke of 5 Now we don’t have anything else on this screen. That’s green with a stroke of 5 so in theory. What should happen now is if I select this. That should be the only thing that’s selected on the screen, just like what happened here, and that’s because we’re using all three of those attributes, so we’re doing fill color, stroke, color and stroke weight. Hopefully this is making sense so far, pretty straightforward. Let’s shift command a to unselect everything or deselect now what I want to do. I’m gonna get rid of fill color and Stroke color. I’m gonna go with just strokeweight and I’ve got a tolerance set of five points. So if you remember, we bumped some of these up, so let’s let’s use this little blue guy here, okay, now, if we look at him and just our ad parents in the properties panel, we’ve got a three point stroke on there, so there’s a five point tolerance again In theory, that means that if we’ve got anything between three and eight, it should also pick up, so let’s go lie and lets. Grab this guy, okay, So let’s go select inverse command three, and we’re hiding everything. Now, if you remember, this is one that we selected right so three point, which this has a one point stroke on it. This one has a five point stroke on it. This one has a five point. This one has a five point. This one has a five point, so anything above that tolerance that you know that we set because remember the other ones. I put up to ten and fifteen. They’re not going to get grabbed because of that tolerance. Now the other thing you can do here. The other options are opacity, which again you can set a tolerance for your opacity. So if you wanted to select everything, say 50% or lower, you can set that up, and if you wanted to do a blending mode if you’ve got different blending modes in here and you just want to make some changes to say everything that you put, you know, blending mode of oh. I don’t know, let’s say multiply or screen. You can grab just those objects and then make those changes that you want to make. So that’s it one thing that we went through there open. It made sense. Go back, watch it again. It’s a pretty simple tool to work with, but remember double. Click on that little icon to be able to get that fly out menu and make adjustments based on kind of what you need to select inside of your illustrations. I know you’re not always going to use this tool a lot of times. What you can do is go up to the! Select menu and you go down to same, and then there’s options in there. I just find that since I’ve started using the Magic Wand. Things are going a little bit quicker for me rather than having to go up and use the second. Thank you, all right, so that’s it for this one, you guys. I hope you enjoyed this first episode of 30 tools and 30 days for Adobe Illustrator coming up in a new year. I’m gonna start putting on more content. Based around the project work working with clients pricing, graphic design. How to be a freelancer how to price yourself. It’s so many different subjects that I’ve got actual one, a walkie guys through from say, a client briefed on a business card all the way through to submitting it for print and then submitting a invoice to your client. So please stick around. If you like this video, if you hit the thumbs up, it really does help out the channel, and I gotta get back to work now and a lot of work to do in the next 30 days. So I seen my next video. It’s right here. You should see my desk right now. I’m working on the office. What do you think of the bathroom lights coming? I’ve got a really cool wall hanging than I’m putting up [Music].