In this lesson you'll learn about the Magic Wand tool as well as the Lasso tool in
Illustrator. So why would you want to use either of these? Well, the Magic Wand tool
it works a little bit differently in Illustrator compared to Photoshop.
It's not about clicking an area of pixels and then selecting similar pixels around
that area or other areas that are close to the hue and the values of those
pixels that you've selected. It's more about selecting objects and then related
objects on the same canvas.
So for example, if you open up decorative.ai from the support files.
And if Iwanted to select all of these little designs up here, I can click it, hold
SHIFT, click, click, click, and so on but another way is to just select the
Magic Wand tool and then click one of these. You notice it didn't select a lot of the other ones.
We have to double click on the Magic Wand tool
and add some attributes and settings. So similar fill color. We could select that.
If I selected that, now it selects all these and it has a tolerance just like in Photoshop's
Magic Wand Tool. This one has a Tolerance of 20 So if you do Stroke Color, if I click this one down here,
then it only selects these little branches like the stems basically, these designs.
So we have five different criteria to select things in a file. If you want to
select everything that has a certain Fill Color, Stroke Color or the Stroke Weight
or thickness of that stroke,
Opacity Level and also Blending Mode. So we don't have to click individually and hold
SHIFT. Just select a bunch of different things in a file. The Tolerance is just that.
If you have it set to 0, it's only going to select things that are the exact same
attribute as where you're clicking. If you set it way high, it will start to include
other related colors that are close to that selected color. So if I set it to 0 and
just click this right here, it only selects, that's the same exact color and stroke color.
If I click this here, it's the same exact. So it's not a lot of
different hues in this because we have the same exact color for all of these
areas in the stroke color as well So we set that to 0,
Same thing. It's just a quicker way to select a lot of things that are similar
in one or more of these five criteria. Now the other tool I want to go over is the
Lasso tool, and this works a little bit differently in Illustrator compared to
Photoshop as well. If we want to select an area of objects. If I use the
Selection tool for example, and click and drag, I'm really limited to either a square or
a rectangle shape, right, so I'm selecting all of this. What if I just wanted to select
these? What you can do is select the Lasso Tool and then just click and drag up
along an angle. Whoa, went too far, and then now I've selected all of that right there, and it also selects this.
So that's a quick way to select objects on an artboard and you
don't have to use a square or a rectangle. So these are basically selection tools.
They just work a little bit differently in Illustrator compared to Photoshop.
Thanks and I will see you in the next lesson.