How to: make transparent background in GIMP

[woodsmoke]

As the long time users of GIMP, and the subset of those who sometimes desire a transparent background sometimes know; GIMP has always been rather "cumbersome" for the casual user in terms of making a transparent background.

Power users, of course, don't have this problem but we humble, sometimes, users often found the technique....challenging!

The wonderful developers of GIMP version 2.6 have removed a lot of the encumberage by, quite simply, changing the method.

Rather than providing a set of text steps I'll link to this very clear, and simple, method.

The one qualification to it is that of making a transparent background for something like a "digital signature".

Unless one purposely leaves very small gaps in the loop of the original signature, or paints them in and then flattens, the copied image, part way through the process, will have the original colour in the loops.

Since the original was probably made on white paper, and the digital signature will probably be on white "digital paper" then this is may not be of grave concern.

I did not find any easy way, by using a ctrl key for example, to get transparency into the loops manually. If someone can post a method then I would request that they do so!

So the linky:

http://gimp-university.blogspot.com/...revisited.html

woodsmoke

[Fintan]

Thank you for the link. I do a lot of this stuff for my websites. here is how I do it:
Use "magic Wand" to select background. At this stage one can do the selection->invert->grow bit if needed, then reinvert the selection.
Now just right-click on the selection and choose color->transparency. Viola!

Hope this is helpful

[woodsmoke]

just the kind of post that is VERY helpful! thankee!

woodsmoke