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Digitize part of a picture with the Magic wand

Use the Magic wand when you want stitches for part of a picture, one area at a time, instead of tracing the whole thing. Click a patch of color on a reference picture and it becomes a stitched shape in its own thread, with clean curved outlines you can edit like anything you drew. It suits a logo where you want only the emblem and not the background, or a picture where you want to choose the order and the stitch of each area yourself.

New in v1.3.3. The wand runs on your own computer and costs no credits. To digitize a whole picture in one go, use Auto-Trace instead.

Example: a two-tone apple from a logo, for a 60 mm patch

A PNG of a red apple, with a darker red shadow and a green leaf, on a white background.

  1. Import it as a reference image at 60 mm wide, and lock it so it doesn't move.
  2. Press W. The wand's bar appears at the bottom of the canvas.
  3. Hover the apple. The area a click would take lights up. If the shadow is not included, that's fine: leave Tolerance at 20.
  4. Click the apple. A new object named Region appears in a red thread, and it is selected.
  5. Hold Shift and click the shadow. It joins the apple as one shape in the same red, instead of a second object.
  6. Click the leaf (no Shift). It becomes its own object, in a green thread.
  7. Changed your mind about the leaf? Ctrl/Cmd+Z takes back only that last click.
  8. Hide the reference picture and switch to the Stitch view to check the result.

Use the wand​

  1. Have a picture in your design: import a reference image first. The wand works on a locked picture too, but not on a hidden one. With no picture in the design, its bar says: "Import an image, then click a region of it to digitize it."
  2. Pick Magic wand: press W, click it in the tool rail's Automation group (below Advanced auto-digitize), or use the Tools menu. The pointer turns into a crosshair.
  3. Hover the picture. The region a click would digitize is highlighted, so you see exactly what you will get before you click.
  4. Click. The region becomes a stitched object, named Region, and is selected. While it works, the bar reads Digitizing….
  5. Click the next region. The wand stays on until you pick another tool.

The new object is an ordinary shape: move it, edit its nodes, change its stitch type or its thread, and reorder it in the sewing order like anything else.

If the area under the pointer is too small to sew, you see: "That region is too small to sew. Raise the tolerance or click a larger area."

The wand's bar​

While the wand is on, a bar at the bottom of the canvas holds its two settings. Both are remembered on this device for the next time.

SettingDefaultWhat it does
Tolerance20 (0 to 100)How far a color can be from the one you click and still join the region. Raise it when a click takes only part of an area that has slight shading or soft edges; lower it when a click spills into a neighboring color.
Stitch typeAutomaticAutomatic picks running, satin, or fill from the region's shape, the way Auto-Trace chooses. Fill always makes a tatami fill, and Satin always makes a satin.

Moving the Tolerance slider updates the highlight under the pointer at once, so you can tune it before you click.

With Automatic, a broad area comes in as a fill, a narrow band or a dot as a satin, and a hairline as a running line, just as Auto-Trace would sew it. A click on a net of lines can come in as several objects (satin columns, running lines and small fills), all selected together. The new object starts from your design's fabric preset.

Add to the last region with Shift-click​

Hold Shift and click to add another area to the object the wand just made. The two areas become one shape that shares its outline where they touch, in the first area's thread. Use it for an area the first click didn't fully reach, such as a highlight or a shadow inside a fill.

Shift-click adds to the last wand object only while that object is still selected and you click on the same picture. Otherwise a Shift-click makes a new object, like a plain click. Clicking with Shift inside what the object already covers changes nothing.

Threads​

Each region gets a thread in its own color from the picture. When a color already in your palette is so close that no one could tell the two apart, the wand reuses it, so clicking a second patch of the same red does not add a second red to the palette. Otherwise it adds a new palette color.

To swap it for a real thread from a chart afterwards, see Match thread colors.

Undo​

Every click is one undo step, its new thread included. A Shift-click is one step too: undo it and the object goes back to how it was before that click.

Clean outlines​

The wand's shapes come in as smooth curves, with sharp corners only where the picture's outline really turns, so they are easy to edit and sew cleanly at any size. You get far fewer nodes than the pixels of the picture would suggest.

Pro​

The wand is free to use on any plan. Exporting or publishing a design with shapes it made needs Pro, like Auto-Trace. On a plan that can't export them, the bar shows a Pro badge: "Free to use. Exporting a design made with the magic wand needs Pro." The export prompt lists these shapes as Auto-trace. See What counts as Pro content.