Selecting by Tone or Color

The selection tools you’ve seen so far isolate a selection spatially (in terms of space)—either you’re drawing an edge or a Photoshop tool is looking for an edge. But there’s more than one way to look at an image. When the selection you want is easy to isolate by tone or color value, you can use this next set of Photoshop selection tools and tricks.

An important feature of the tone and color selection tools is the idea of tolerance—how similar a tone or color value should be to the value you’ve clicked before it’s considered part of a selection. For example, a blue sky is normally many shades of blue, so if you want to select it by color you’d typically set the Tolerance range wide enough to include all of the sky’s blues, without admitting nearby colors that aren’t part of the sky.