![]() Now that you’ve told GIMP which pixels should be entirely transparent, it’s time to tell it which pixels should remain fully opaque. Step 4: Set the nearest full-opacity color You should notice that your selection is beginning to appear more accurate in the preview window. For my example, I’ll be clicking on the whitest area: Use this tool to select the brightest area of your image that contains the color that you’d like to make transparent. Within the menu, select the middle dropper icon labelled “ pick the farthest full-transparency color” when you hover your cursor over it: This is where the Color to Alpha tool begins to shine. Ideally, you’d want to make all similar colors transparent as well.įor example, the color of the shirt in my image is white, but there’s many different grayscale shades that need to be made transparent as well, otherwise the shirt wont be entirely transparent. Seeing as how nuanced the color composition of images can be, chances are you don’t just want to make a single color transparent. Step 3: Set the farthest full-transparency color Alternatively, you can also click on the white stripe to manually input a color code if you prefer to do it that way.įor this example image I will be making the shirt color transparent, so I clicked on the area of the image where the shirt is. With the dropper selected, click on the area of your image that contains the color you’d like to make transparent. It’s the first item at the top of the list, located next to the white stripe: The dropper icon to select is highlighted in red. To pick the color that you’d like to make transparent in GIMP, click on the dropper icon in the Color to Alpha menu labelled “ pick color from the image” when you hover your cursor over it. Step 2: Pick the color that you’d like to make transparent Lighter areas become more transparent, whereas darker areas remain more opaque. The reason why this happens is because by default, the Color field in the Color to Alpha menu is white (as indicated by the white stripe in the menu.) This means that the white portion of all of the colors in your image are reduced to transparency based on a scale of how much white the color contains. Once opened, you should notice that a large portion of the image on your canvas becomes partially transparent: Your image may look something like this when you first open the Color to Alpha menu. ![]() To access this menu, navigate to Colors > Color to Alpha. Step 7 - Invert this selection ( Select tab -> Invert (or ctrl-I) Step 8 - Use Bucket Fill Tool (with Black foreground) to fill selection - make sure to select the option Fill whole selection Step 9 - You should now have an image of your signature with a transparent background Use the File -> Export option to save as a. Step 6 - Use the Select by Color Tool to select the background Step 5 - Clean up the extraneous spots with the Eraser Tool A dirty scanner glass can sometimes leave 'dirt marks' on a scanned image that should be removed with the eraser Step 4 - Use the Select by Color Tool to select the background and erase with the Delete key The Select by Color Tool will select all the areas of the same color, even if they are isolated from the area you click in (this does NOT happen with the Fuzzy Select Tool) ![]() Step 3 - Add alpha channel (if there is none, the layer name will be in BOLD characters) NOTE: If there is NO alpha channel, you cannot create a transparent background ![]() Step 2 - Crop the signature AND duplicate this layer (just in case you mess up) I find it is a good idea to duplicate the working layer after each step I always make the lower layers invisible to see only the layer I'm working on. Step 1 - Scan image of signature and open the file in the GIMP Here are the steps to clean up a scanned image of a signature to create a transparent background. This technique is illustrated using the Gimp, a free, open source image editor ( ). ![]() Although the question concerns a scanned signature, this technique can be easily applied to any graphics file that requires a transparent background. This article is in response to an Experts Exchange question Trouble cleaning a signature. ![]()
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