Re: [Gimp-user] Extreme newby needs some help please!

[Greg Chapman <gregtutor yahoo co uk>]

Hi Jessica,

On 13 Aug 12 01:04 Jessica Tomlinson <jtsoundtech92 yahoo com> said:
> I've attached this question mark which is a test that I've been 
> playing with.  I want to make it transparent, like a regular GIF 
> image, so you can set it against color and not have a tacky white 
> square.  I've been trying to select and cut the white area with the 
> "select by color" tool, but I'm not sure if this is working or not.

The "Select by color" or "Fuzzy select" tool should do the job of 
selecting the white area, producing a set of "marching ants" around 
the selected colour.

However, before you do that you need to "Add Alpha Channel" to the 
layer. It is that channel that allows an area to become transparent 
when you delete a selection.

Then hit the DELETE key and the selected area will become transparent 
showing a grey checkerboard to indicate transparancy.

> I wanted to do the same for some black stray lines, but it didn't 
> work at all.  But for this, I could get rid of them with the eracer 
> tool.

You probably just made them white - the eraser simply paints in the 
background colour (whereas the pencil and brush, etc paint in 
foreground colour), so in this case it just happened to be the colour 
you wanted.

> Also, instead of saving as a GIF file, it insists on saving 
> this as a GIMP image!  Why is this??

Because GIMP will only SAVE to its native format (.xcf). If you want 
to produce a file in another format you must EXPORT it and choose the 
desired file format.

Greg Chapman
http://www.gregtutor.plus.com
Helping new users of KompoZer and The GIMP