Photo manipulation (GIMP) help.

Grislo

Okay, so, probably a simple question, but I'm a moron with programs like GIMP:

Say I want to cut something out of Picture A - like a football, to keep it simple.

I freehand cut it (or whatever), and copy the cut area.

Now, when I insert the cut football to a new picture, it shows up as a square, with the empty areas around the cut object filled by black. How can I insert just the cut bit?

Sir Carcass

Try copying the whole picture with the football, pasting it in a new image that has a transparent background, then cutting the football from that.

Grislo

I think my problem might be that, despite the cut object having a transparent background, it still fills out with black when I insert it to a new image. I'll give that a go, though, thanks.

Sir Carcass

You could also try doing the same to the image you're posting in.

blakfeld

GIMPs a little weird with file formats. I think whats happening is you have like a jpeg or something, so when you copy it over, its copying that segment as a jpeg, which doen't allow transparency. I think you're best bet would be to single out the football, erase the rest of the image, and save it as a .png or .gif, then import it into the new image

AtomBomb

Also make sure that both the image you are cutting from and the image you are pasting into have an alpha channel (transparency). You can also set your color to something that isn't in the football image (like hot pink), paste it into its own layer, select the hot pink and delete it.