Simple Selections: The Quick Selection tool

The Quick Selection tool certainly has a more instant appeal about it. Click and drag the cursor through the area that you want selected; it operates just like the Magic Wand tool, based on pixel color, while continually expanding its semi-automated selection process as you drag the cursor over different colored pixels. Because of its design, you'll note that this selection tool is very good at snapping to the edges of same-colored objects.

Note that the Magic Wand tool might also be fairly effective with this kind of selection subject, but it would probably need lots of additional mouse-clicking to scoop up all the tone variants, including shade, shadow, and other tonal inconsistencies, that every picture throws at us. In this example, it's the shading in the clouds that's hard to assess—those tones are hard to see with the naked eye, but nevertheless will appear a challenge to select evenly using a...