Gimp and Inkscape help needed

samsam7

Hey guys I'm working on a little project with Gimp and Inkscape (very new at this and frustrated), and I can't figure out how to do something.

I've got a photo in Gimp, and I'm trying to cut out a circle, and copy paste it into Inkscape (or anywhere for that matter). Now when I select a circle with the circle selection tool, and then copy and paste while in Gimp, everything is fine, I can drag the circle around and what not, but when I copy and paste it into Inkscape or Paint, a black rectangle comes along with it basically making my selected circle into a circle inside of a black rectangle. The same thing happens when I use the fuzzy selection tool + selection-invert to closely select along the edges of an image thats on a white background. I can get what I want in Gimp, but when I try to copy it into Inkscape or Paint, it shows up surrounded by a solid black rectangle.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

blakfeld

Why don't you select what you want form the image, use invert selection and erase the rest of the image, and just save it in a format that supports transparency like .gif or .png (you'll probably want png).

I'm not familar with inkscape, but that's what makes sense to me

MushroomStick

A quick read through the wikipedia article on inkscape leads me to believe it doesn't support what you're trying to do. I don't know what end result you're going for, but maybe import your art from inkscape into gimp would work?

samsam7

Thanks blakfeld, that actually worked as a quick fix. Apparently this problem might have something to do with adding an alpha channel but I'm not even sure what a channel in gimp is exactly. I think its like a layer of transparent pixels.

The reason why I think it should work is because I saw someone do this exact thing. Unfortunately I can't get in contact with them Perhaps my original problem has something to do with gimp using black pixels instead of transparent pixels.

Edit: Ok I understand that an alpha channel is the checkerboard background that is considered 'transparent', that I need to add so that I can have transparency, otherwise it defaults to a white background when I delete something, right? So basically, the issue is my alpha channel area shows up as black instead of transparent when I copy paste a selected area from gimp to paint or inkscape.