How to Get Rid of a Background in Photoshop With the Magic Wand
When you want to put the focus on something in a photograph, no matter how you focus your camera or position the subject matter, there's going to be a background. With the tools included in the Adobe Photoshop graphic design software, you can truly put your focus forward by eliminating that background digitally. Each of Photoshop's selection tools work slightly differently. Use the software's "Magic Wand" tool to figure out which pixels to grab for elimination and get your background out of the picture.
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Instructions
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Open Adobe Photoshop. Select the "File" menu and click "Open." Browse to the picture with the background you wish to remove and double-click the name of the image.
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Click the "Magic Wand Tool," the fourth icon from the top of the Tools column. Note the toolbar changes at the top of the work area. If the Tolerance box does not show "100," type "100" into the box. Leave all of the other toolbar options as their defaults.
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Click anywhere in the background of your image. Note the dotted lines surrounding aspects of the background -- check whether the magic wand has picked up areas of the foreground that you don't want to delete.
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Test the wand's grab by pulling down the "Edit" menu and selecting "Cut." If the wand grabbed and deleted any of the foreground, click the "Edit" menu and select "Undo" to revert back to the original.
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Lower the number in the "Tolerance" box and continue experimenting by clicking the picture until the wand grabs only the background and none of the portion of the image to keep. Note that the wand will almost always not grab the entire background at once.
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When the wand has grabbed only a portion of the background, click the "Edit" menu and select "Cut."
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Click the wand on another portion of the background and continue the "Edit" and "Cut" process. Work your way around the picture eliminating the major parts of the background without harming the foreground.
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Clean up very small areas of the background that the wand didn't grab by clicking the "Lasso Tool," located just above the Magic Wand. Draw an outline around the area and when blinking lines appear, click "Edit" and select "Cut." Repeat until all of the background is gone.
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Click the "File" menu. Select "Save As." Enter a new name for the picture without a background and click "Save."
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Tips & Warnings
Because the Magic Wand Tool grabs pixels in a pre-configured way, you're almost always going to need to repeat the use of the tool and perform an extra few cleanup steps. Unlike user-defined selections such as with the Lasso Tool, the Magic Wand has an imprecision when selecting on an image that is not flat and made up of one single color.
