Selecting single strands of hair may come to haunt your dreams.įortunately, there are some helpful tools that can make the process simpler and far less stress-inducing. It’s simple enough if you’re working on a photo of a plain plastic cube, but as soon as your shapes get more complex, the time investment grows rapidly. This part of the process is by far the most time-consuming and fiddly. Step 2: Isolate Your Subject With A Selection If the option is unavailable, your image probably already has an alpha channel.Īlpha channels are created automatically once you add multiple layers to an image because transparency is an essential element of how the layer compositing works, so that may have taken care of things for you already. The simplest way is to open the Layers menu from the menubar, select the Transparency submenu, and click Add Alpha Channel. There are two ways to add an alpha channel to your image. Alpha channels are also just grayscale images, but instead of representing red, green, or blue, any white pixels it contains are treated as transparent.

In order to add transparency to our image, we need to make sure it contains a fourth channel called an alpha channel. Each channel is just a grayscale image, but depending on which channel it represents, white pixels display as the channel color and are combined to make a normal image. Typical computer images are made up of three color channels: a Red channel, a Green channel, and a Blue channel. Step 1: Adding Transparency with an Alpha Channel

Step 4: Export Your Image as a PNG File.

Step 3: Remove or Hide Unwanted Background Areas.Step 2: Isolate Your Subject With A Selection.Step 1: Adding Transparency with an Alpha Channel.

Gimp transparent background tutorial