You may wish to copy my settings as shown at the example below and before you start outlining your object make sure that the draw foreground option is selected at the settings. Next you need to select the foreground by using the foreground select tool. This needs to be done, to ensure that there is transparency at this layer. Once you open your image, right click on the image layer and click “ Add Alpha Channel“. If you have a complex background to remove, you need to take a different approach to do your job.įor the second part of this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to remove the background by adding a transparent layer and how to add a layer of your preference. All done! Advanced tutorial: Removing the complex background of an image in GIMP To export the image go to File -> Export As, choose PNG file format and click on Export. I have to remove the blue background in this example. You might have to repeat the steps 2 to step 4 if necessary. If you have other different coloured regions that you need to remove, click on them and delete them. Press the Delete keyboard button to remove the background. Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel Step 4: Delete the background If your image has only one layer (like our example), this background layer has no Alpha channel. It represents the transparency of the image. Step 3: Add TransparencyĪn alpha channel is automatically added into the Channel Dialog as soon as you add a second layer to your image. This tool will help us to select the unwanted background with one click. The Fuzzy Select tool is designed to select areas of the current layer or image based on colour similarity. Although I want to maintain a good habit and open my image as following.įile -> Open as Layers Open As Layers Step 2: Use the Fuzzy select tool

This tutorial is so simple that if you just open your image, it will still be fine. How to Make a Transparent Background in GIMP Step 1: Open up the image as a layerĪs I have mentioned before, you need to get used to isolate different images and actions as layers. In a later section, I'll share a CLI tool that could help you remove the background automatically. I am going to show you how to do that step-by-step in this GIMP tutorial.

While using an online tool like Canva is easier for this purpose, not everyone can opt for the premium plan.Īnd this is where you can use the free and open source tool GIMP to remove the background from an image. This is quite handy in graphic designing. If you put a transparent image on top of a blue image, the image will now have a blue background. When you make the image background transparent, you can use the colour according to the background of the new image. There could be many reasons why you would want to do that.įor example, you don’t like the background, you want to add the image to another background, or you simply want to make the image transparent. Removing the background is one of the most used graphic design procedures.

Gimp transparent background to color