Magic Wand/Lasso question

[Retiredslacker]

I have trouble getting the selected area to behave; too high a percentage too much is selected; too little and the area frequently contains hundreds of tiny exceptions. When I try to lasso them to include in the selected area, the program grinds to a halt and then does not draw the selection as I desired, it seems to ignore multiple mouse positions, then it is terribly slow in redisplaying the resultant selection. How can I better control this? I have really good system AMD FX-832 8-core,3.5 GHzCPU,  20GB DDR3, nVidia 970 Ti, and lots of storage running on W10 pro 64bit, so I don't think it is a hardware issue.

Is this just the way the tools behave? I often work with images that are not sharply in focus, or with precisely defined edges, and often the work areas are multi-colored areas, so I understand the hundreds of little exceptions in the selected area, but clearing them up and controlling the selection is a problem.

Thanks.

[IRON67]

In your case you should use an other way. Make a new layer, use the paintbrush and/or the line/curve tool to mark the areas (and fill them with a color). Then select this color global, switch to the main layer with the image and do what you want with.

[MJW]

A variation of Iron67's useful suggestion is: Select the region with the Magic Wand with a tolerance that leaves unselected exceptions. Add a new layer and Fill the selection (with the Primary Color). In some cases, this will be enough. Just select the transparent outside region with the Magic Wand (in Contiguous mode), invert the selection, and switch to the original layer. When that doesn't work, clear the selection and use the Paintbrush to fill in the unselected holes. Then use the Magic Wand to select the colored region. Often it works better to copy the new layer into the Clipboard and use Paste Alpha.

 

It's pretty roundabout, but using the Magic Wand for anything very subtle is like sculpting with a hatchet. Or so it seems to me.