How can I select exact color in Illustrator

Question

I made this design in photoshop so basically its on rasterize format, A month later my client want it again but this time it has to be on vector format because it will be print on various colored shirts.
what I did was open it on illustrator and used image trace with high fidelity and expand it, Now what I want is to remove the specific color, black on background so the tree will not be filled. If I use the magic wand it will select the other similar black color.

I love to hear tips and advises too, Is there any better method to do it?

Rasterized design

Answer 1

You can also remove the black color in Illustrator itself. Once you have traced and expanded the image, you need to:

• ungroup the image (Command + Shift + G)
• select any one part of the image that contains the color you want to remove (black in this case) with the Direct Selection Tool (A)
• go to the Select menu > Same > Fill Color

All components that contain black as a fill color will get selected and you can then delete them or fill them with a different color etc. There are other options too with in the Select > Same menu that are useful.

Answer 2

You can use the magic wand (Y) to select objects of similar, or even exactly the same, fill or stroke colour. double-click the tool in the toolbox to set the Tolerance to 1, meaning it will only select shapes of exactly the same colour.

Be warned that, depending on your tracing setting, this may leave some not-entirely-black objects behind, you might need to remove those as well.