Why won't my Adobe Illustrator Magic Wand do anything?

Question

I have a logo and I would like to remove the white background. It is an eps file.
I cannot get my magic wand in Illustrator to do anything--I click it on the image and nothing happens. When I open the file in Photoshop I can use the magic wand and select the white background no problem, but then when I delete the white background it just turns the background to black (I need it to be transparent).
I have pretty limited experience with Illustrator and photoshop so any advice would be really appreciated!
Thank you so much!

Thank you everyone so far, but please keep in mind I am a bit of a rookie at this so please be patient with me :)
I have removed the background successfully but cannot find any option tin my Save window to save the transparent background. Unfortunately, when I save it and put it into Illustrator, that white background shows right back up again.
Any ideas?
Thanks again!

Answer 1

There might be better answers, but use it in Photoshop since it's working there, select the background than go to selection and inverse the selection, then goto edit and copy, then goto file and new, it'll automatically set the right size for the image on your clipboard but you need to select transparent for the image background before hitting ok for the new file settings, then goto edit and paste to see your selection with no background and save the file with the maintain transparency option checked. HTH!

Answer 2

First off you have to make your image into Layer 0 in Photoshop. You do this by double-clicking on the image in your Layers menu on the right side of your screen (called the "background image") and select "Layer 0." Now you can select the magic wand and click on the white background. If the wand's sensitivity is set to "0" then it won't pick up anything. Set it to 2 or 3 and it should select all the white area. Shift-click to select additional white areas. When you delete the selection, you should see a checkerboard pattern instead of the white area. That is your transparency. It now depends on how the file is saved. If you flatten the image, it will change the transparency back to white again. If you save it as an EPS file, make sure the transparency is preserved. That should be part of your "save as" options but I don't recall what Illustrator calls it. Printing a file with an alpha channel (transparency) is something Photoshop or Illustrator should be able to do, but save the image as a .psd or something Adobe will know how to treat. Saving it as a bitmap (.bmp) or jpeg will destroy the alpha channel.

Answer 3

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Bye Bye

Answer 4

turn the background colour in your pallet on the left to 'none' or transparent