[Courses][gimp] Lesson 5: Basic Drawing Tools

[Julie Sloan]

On Friday 04 March 2005 12:25 am, Akkana Peck wrote:
> Wow, some of you already do stuff I don't know how to do in gimp,
> like making new brushes. 

That wasn't me  :)  

> Julie Sloan writes:
> > Then I found a cat to lay on my stack of paper and used the freehand
> > select tool (and lots of "undo") to remove the previous background from
> > around the cat, and after lots of trial and error also removed the
> > white background I was left with.
>
> Freehand select is hard to do accurantely, isn't it?

Yes it is!  I found it's easier to select bits and pieces to remove than try 
to select all of what I want to keep.  Then I select that and paste it into 
a new temporary image, to play with background colors and make sure I have 
all the little snips of whatever gone.

> > I have another cat who was on the refrigerator but I thought she would
> > look good on the monitor, so I repeated the process I used with the
> > other cat... but for some reason I can see stuff through her.  I don't
> > know what I did
>
> I'm not sure why either.  But if you used "select contiguous regions" on
> the second cat, it might be that some areas got partially selected.
> She's already transparent by the time she shows up in the xcf --
> I checked to see if the layer had gotten transparent, but that
> wasn't it, so it must have been that for some reason she was only
> partially selected before you copied her.

I noticed later I had the "threshold" on the wand tool set higher than the 
default 15, by accident.  Don't know if that would cause it or not.  Also 
later on I somehow lost the original black cat layer and ended up with only 
the three duplicates!  This, or something, made her green eye color 
disappear and I could not get it back on the first few tries, and I had 
more to do, so I moved on.

> I'm also not sure how to make a partially transparent layer opaque
> again.  I played with various operations and couldn't find an easy
> way.  The best I found was to select the layer in the layers dialog,
> go back to the image and Copy, then Edit->Paste as New, then in the
> new image, do Image->Flatten Image.  That gets a cat with the right
> color pattern, but with a white background.  Then
> Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel so the new image can do
> transparency again, Select by Color to select the white background,
> Clear, Copy, then paste back into the original image.

 I'm going to practice that.  It took me forever and lots of trial and error 
to get rid of the white backgrounds around the cats, because I could _not_ 
find "select by color", although I'd used it before.  Looked just now, and 
it's right there.  Maybe my monitorcat-of-the-hour had his or her tail in 
the way.  

> One thing you can do to make it a little easier is to use
> one layer to select part of another layer.  For instance, in
> http://shallowsky.com/software/justmoon/justmoon.jpg
> I wanted the j and the m to intertwine.  So I put the j layer
> (and its shadow) on top, and then on the layer with the m, I
> used "select by color" or some similar tool to select the m,

That's _cool_ looking.   I need to play with intertwining stuff like that, 
too...

Julie
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