I'd like to thank all of you for your helpful ideas and support. Daniel, thanks for your nice words. ;) I'm a bit clearer on most points now, but am still quite foggy on this whole selecting with a layer mask thing. Why would one want some pixels to be partially selected, or partially transparent? I would think you'd want any part to be either selected or not, transparent or opake. What extra functionality does this "partial" gray area give one in cleaning up an image? Also, I've found that there's some tutorials in the user guide, but is there a place on the web where they are shared and updated as well?
________________________________ From: Daniel Hauck <dan...@yacg.com> To: Jessica Tomlinson <jtsoundtec...@yahoo.com> Cc: "gimp-user-list@gnome.org" <gimp-user-list@gnome.org> Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2012 8:40 PM Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] Extreme newby needs some help please! First thing I wanna say is I support teachers. I had many teachers... most good... some not... My sons had teachers... dated a teacher... anyway, I know the life of a teacher and what they do. Not just government employees or civil servants, but community builders and more. Truly unsung heroes. Anyway, that aside, let's talk about what you want to accomplish. Firstly, there's a constantly accumulating pool of examples and tutorials out there. Find them and work through them. You will have ideas while you go through them so explore and learn. Get a feel for what's going on in there. One of my favorite things to have learned about is layer masking. With layer masking, you can really get good effects with semi-transparency controlled through layer masking. And Layer masking is what your project wants the most. First thing you need to do is add transparency to your layer. Do this by going to the layer menu, transparency and add alpha channel. Alpha is a fancy way of saying some pixels are more transparent than others. And layer masks let you control that transparency where black is 100% transparent and white is 100% opaque and the greys in between are levels of transparency. So one thing I did was right-click on the layer and add layer mask... or you could use the menus.. same thing. It offers a dialog with options... I went with "Grayscale copy of layer" and checked the "invert mask" and "OK" You'll already have achieved the desired effect... (affect? are you an English teacher? I always get those confused...anyway... okay, it's effect... I think) The effect isn't perfect though. If you add a layer and make it white, then drag that new white layer under (behind) the original layer and you will see a lighter colored version of your original image. It's the white showing through. You may want to tweak this a bit by right-clicking on your main layer and then selecting "show layer mask." Now you can see a black and white negative of your image. Now you can play with the brightness, contrast, and (my favorite) the levels. With the mask showing, you can tweak the lighter areas in a way that makes the sem-transparent with the white later beneath look like your original image. Once achieved, you can do this to all of your letters in a repetitive fashion. I got pretty good results... wanna see? On 08/12/2012 08:04 PM, Jessica Tomlinson wrote: > Hi all, > I'm really pleased to discover such a complete, free application which >grew out of a community spirit. However, I'm a little frustrated because I'm >having a bit of trouble figuring out just what makes it tick ;0. I've pored >over parts of the online guide, and am having trouble understanding some of >the language in it. Basically, I'm a teacher, and haven't done much digital >art, but I've been inspired by the whole host of "teacher bloggers" and their >cool creations. I like to draw on paper, but am not very good at it. ;) >Basically, I've drawn a whole set of letters, which I intend to make into an >"alphabet", which is not really a font, but is used like one sometimes. 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. 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. Also, instead of saving as a GIF file, it insists on saving this as a GIMP image! Why is this?? Thanks in advance. > Jessica >
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