The official Gimp tutorial page:

The following video explains the Color Select Tool at minute marker 4:51.

We covered all of the options in the Tool Options box in the tutorials for Rectangle Select and Ellipse Select.
Toolbox Items - Rectangle Select (tutor by group member(s)) Toolbox Items - Ellipse Select Tool (tutor by group member(s))

We will spend some time on trying to understand the use of the features in the "Select by" drop down menu.

A review of the options in the Tool Options Box Select Transparent Areas

This option gives the Magic Wand the ability to select areas that are completely transparent. If this option is not checked, transparent areas will never be included in the selection.

Sample Merged

This option becomes relevant when you have several layers in your image, and the active layer is either semi-transparent or is set to another Layer Mode than Normal. If this is the case, the colors present in the layer will be different from the colors in the composite image. If the "Sample Merged" option is unchecked, the wand will only react to the color in the active layer when it creates a selection. If it is checked it will react to the composite color of all visible layers. For further information, see the glossary entry Sample Merged.

Threshold

This slider determines the range of colors that will be selected at the moment you click the pointer on the initial point, before dragging it: the higher the threshold, the larger the resulting selection. After the first button-press, dragging the pointer downward or to the right will increase the size of the selection; dragging upward or to the left will decrease it. Thus, you have the same set of possibilities regardless of the Threshold setting: what differs is the amount of dragging you have to do to get the result you want.

Selection by

With this option you can choose which component of the image GIMP shall use to calculate the similarity. The components you can choose from are Red, Green, Blue, Hue, Saturation and Value.

It is the components listed above in red that I would like to explore in this tutorial.

I could not find much information that went into details with selecting the above mentioned components. Instead I will show an example of using the Color Select Tool:

Here is the base image we will use:



Next I selected the Color Select Tool and selected the options as shown in the following image:



Then I clicked on the solid color area just below the word Chat on the image which gave me the image below:


Then I selected a paintbrush and a new color and painted over the image as shown above which resulted in the image below. Noticed how the paint only covered the selected area.



I then deselected the image and little marching ants went away as shown belo:


I the decided to make the image stand off the page a bit so I went to "Filters", then "Decor" and "Bevel" and put a bevel on the image to raise it up. Then I went back to "Decor" and did a "Rounded Corners" with a drop shadow to give the image some depth as shown below:

I really like the way Color Select works compared to Fuzzy Select and I may use the above image for the Chit Chat Chums group's banner.

That's really neat, gJ. I like the final results a lot!

TY!