Page 108 - PCWorld (September 2019)

HERE’S HOW PAINT 3D’S MAGIC SELECT TOOL
Then click Magic Select in the menu bar.
Magic Select asks you to slide a
rectangular border around the object you
wish to highlight. Get close to the object
you want to focus upon, as this helps teach
Magic Select what you want to do. Then
click Next.
If you’re lucky, Magic Select may nail it on
the first try, highlighting exactly what you want
to cut out of the scene in a halo of blue. Often,
When you edit a photo with Paint 3D, you’ll probably want to focus
on the Crop and Magic Select tools.
Highlight the object that you want to select using the border
highlighting tool. Surround the object as best you can.
106 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2019
however, you may need to assist. You can
either tell Magic Select to remove an unwanted
part of the image, or add something that it
didn’t know to include. As Microsoft’s
animated tool suggests, try just drawing a line
with your mouse across whatever region you
want to exclude or include.
(A drawn circle would be an excellent
way to tell Magic Select what to choose, but
it doesn’t really work. That’s a real shame,
because you can end up
with tiny little regions of the
photo—sort of like islands—
that are too small to
individually swipe through.)
One tip: if you want to
retrace your steps, use the
Undo or History tool in the
upper-right corner, not the
Go Back button. It seems to
work more effectively.
When you’re happy with
your selection, simply drag
the object off the canvas into
the 3D virtual space next to it.
At this point, you have a
few options. If you want to
place your edited object
into a new scene, you’ll
need to cut and paste it into
a new image in Paint 3D. (I
pasted a USB-C hub into a
beach scene, for fun.) Magic
Select and Paint 3D can’t