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) -- Accordeoniste (via www.gimpusers.com/forums) _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list List address: gimp-user-list@gnome.org List membership: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user-list List archives: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-user-list
