| Adobe Illustrator's Magic Wand Tool |
Click the image to see how you can get the most out of ALL of Adobe Illustrator's tools. It's on sale until September 15, 2009.
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Well, you might be surprised at how much YOU will need it after reading this. Here’s how it works. Select the Magic Wand (press the Y key), and click it on an object on your pasteboard. Every object that contains the clicked object’s attributes will be selected. Not bad huh? That means that if you have a drawing with a whole bunch of .25-pt lines that you decide should be half-point instead. Crawling all over the document and selecting each path that looks like it has a hairline could be pretty tedious. The Magic Wand takes care of that. And, say some of those hairlines are red, and others are black? Well, you can select either the red ones or the black ones, OR BOTH. Just press the Shift key and click another selection and you’ve got them all. Make your change – even change their color to blue, and you’re done in one shot. You can also subtract from that selection of objects by pressing the Option/Alt key and clicking on the dudes you want out of the selection. Tip: If you think you may want to change the blue lines back to red, after you’ve selected them, choose Select>Save Selection. Give the selection a good name, and it’ll be available at the bottom of the Select menu when you want it again. |
Whoopee… a “Magic” Wand. Who needs it?But wait! There’s more. Sure, just double-click the Magic Wand’s icon in the toolbar. That brings up its preference panel shown here.
The options are pretty obvious, but I’ll explain them just to keep you from falling to sleep. When the Fill Color box is checked, then you’re just going for, well, the fill color. BUT, there’s that Tolerance field over there. What’s that all about? Well, you can enter a value here from zero to 255 pixels, or zero to 100 pixels in CMYK to be able to select everything that’s CLOSE to what you’ve selected. For instance, what if you’ve created this really great red color for a fill in two or three objects. You’ve also got some super dark orange-reds, and a few reds that tend toward blue. Then your co-worker got hold of your document and made a few changes, including creating their own brand of red. Now you have two reds in the document, and you think they clash – they should all be one red. Use the tolerance selection to narrow down (smaller numbers) – or expand (larger numbers) your color selection to grab all the reds. Make your change, and everything is good again.
Do the same with the Stroke Color and Weight (tolerance between zero and 1000 points).
By the same token, you may find yourself looking for certain levels of transparency/opacity. Maybe you want to round all those 18.43% and 22.79% tints to 20% - just for your own sanity. Set a tolerance that works, and click away. Blending modes – you know, Normal, Darken, Lighten, Saturation and the rest – can also be selected, so you can change all the Darkens into Multiplies.
Unfortunately, the Magic Wand tool is completely useless when it comes to type. It has no effect at all.
Free Adobe Illustrator tips and tricks:
Pointer tools. Why are there two of them?
Magic Wand? I thought this was Illustrator, not Photoshop!
Lasso tool. Yippie Yi Yay, round ‘em up Roy!
Line Segment tool. Keeping you on the straight and narrow.
Regular Drawing tools. Not just for squares.
Rotate and Reflect tools. The Yin and Yang of distortion.
Scale, Shear, & Reshape tools. This isn’t about weight, cutting, or workouts.
Gradient Blend tool. Shifty use of color.
Gradient Meshes. Blends from your own custom blender!
