[Gimp-user] Having trouble creating transparent background

[Accordeoniste <forums gimpusers com>]

Hello Steve,

Thanks for your suggestions. I did as you suggested and I'm pleased with the
result. It was a painstaking process, though. I had to enlarge the image,
sometimes to 400%, to be able to see it clearly enough to make the necessary
changes. Editing the background was delicate work as I had to be careful not to
make the photo transparent. There was much trial and error involved. There's
still a very slight bit of jaggedness on the perimeter of the photo, but
fortunately it's not so noticeable at magnifications less than 50%. Also,
fortunately, any imperfections in the exported image (including those I didn't
eliminate in the photo itself that I considered minor, although I may go back
and do that later) should become more insignificant once I place my photo on the
background photo I mentioned.

Incidentally, I previously tried that approach, adding a layer mask, that is. I
had found the YouTube video you referred to. That time, though, I thought the
approach failed because after the first attempt, there were spots and faint
lines on the background, even thought I thought the whole background was
transparent. After that first attempt I gave up. This time I was careful to
paint over the blemishes and I eventually eliminated them.

Perhaps you can help me with this too. What are your thoughts about blurring the
background image after I place my photo over it? Will it enhance or detract from
the combined image? I ask this because I based my photo theme on a Wordpress
template when I took my photo, and the template photo features a model against a
blurred background of office buildings. The model stands out distinctly in the
photo, and it looks very professional.

Gary Krupa


> No problem.  There is no one-step push button method; cleanly
> separating
> an object in a photograph from its background always takes some
> tweaking.  But we have ways:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEfRVEC2cmY
>
> True confession:  I almost started to write instructions before I
> thought to look for a video tutorial.
>
> Handy household hint:  While painting bits of your foreground object
> in
> and out of visibility, you can quickly switch from white to black by
> putting the brush over a visible or transparent part of your image in
> progress, hold down the Alt key, and click once.  That will set the
> brush color to whatever was under the center of the brush when you
> clicked on the canvas.
>
> All done?  Crop your image with the Crop tool, save it as an XCF file
> so
> you can make modifications later if desired, scale it to suit and
> Export
> to PNG.  Viola.  (I would take care not so Save the scaled version as
> XCF, which would over-write and destroy the original scale image you
> worked on.)
>
> :o)

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