On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 13:19 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

So anyway, how do I do this?

Bitmap images are rectangular. What you really need is a rectangular image with the corners being transparent or white.

Make the selection bigger than you want, feather the selection, invert, and cut.

Liam

On 03/30/2012 03:19 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

Anyway, a relative just sent me an old old family photo that some nitwit, perhaps a generation or two ago, did some seriously violence to with a pair of scissors. To salvage this one and to make it look presentable I really need to be able to take the scan I have of it and crop it into a oval shape. (Yes, it is a portrait.)

P.P.S. For bonus points, somebody please also explain to me how to fade the edges of the oval slowly to white. that would be really cool, and would, I'm sure, impress the bejesus out of some of my relatives

Hi Ronald,

Gimp's user interface is a bit hard to learn at first. Just do some tutorials, and you'll pick it up in no time.

For your question, I don't know of a way to do this without the use of layers.

With the oval selected, press CTRL+X to cut it out. Then do a CTRL+V To paste the oval. This puts the oval into a "Floating Selection". It is almost like a layer, but not quite.

Now a little about Gimp's interface: You have three windows. In "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo - Brushes, Patterns, Gradients" there is an area for Layers (you probably know this). At the bottom of the layers area (above brushes) and to the left is a create new layer. Press it this turns the "Floating Selection" into a layer.

Next you can select on the other layer (Titled "Background" by default), and delete it by right clicking and pressing "Delete Layer". At this point you should have your image as you desire.

Instructions for feathering (the bonus points):

If your oval's layer isn't selected for any reason select it now. Then pick the "Select by Color Tool" from the Toolbox. Set the threshold to 255(in the bottom half of the toolbox) and click on your oval. This selects your oval...IIRC, there is a easier way to do this, but I don't remember how.

Right Click on the image somewhere and press Select>Shrink. Select a value, perhaps 4 or 5 and hit okay.

Now right click on the image again and press Select>Invert. Right click on the image and Select > Feather Put 4 or 5 and press okay. Press the delete button on your keyboard, and you should be good to go.

Hth and ask away if you have questions, -Stefan Maerz

On 03/30/2012 08:08 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

For your question, I don't know of a way to do this without the use of layers.

Fast and simple: Open your image. Make the selection you want with the oval select tool. Do Select > Feather in your main menu. Then do Control+i (or, Select > Invert) to select everything /but/ your oval. Then drag and drop "white" from the color selector tool in your main toolbox into the image.

Do Control+alt+a to remove your selection (or Select > None), and look at the result. Want more/less "blur" around the edge? Do control-z repeatedly until your oval selection reappears and disappears. Start over, and select more/less pixels in the Select > Feather menu.

No layers, no complications.

:o)

Steve

On 03/30/2012 07:24 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

Fast and simple: Open your image. Make the selection you want with the oval select tool. Do Select> Feather in your main menu. Then do Control+i (or, Select> Invert) to select everything /but/ your oval. Then drag and drop "white" from the color selector tool in your main toolbox into the image.

Do Control+alt+a to remove your selection (or Select> None), and look at the result. Want more/less "blur" around the edge? Do control-z repeatedly until your oval selection reappears and disappears. Start over, and select more/less pixels in the Select> Feather menu.

No layers, no complications.

:o)

Steve

Steve beat me. I wrote an response explaining just this. My explanation was _much_ too complicated, so my apologies.

Anyways here are some tutorials grouped by difficulty: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

-Stefan Maerz

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

For your question, I don't know of a way to do this without the use of layers.

Fast and simple:

Faster, simpler:

Make your oval selection Press [CTRL]+[i]
Press [Delete]

And as others have pointed out, you may with to feather the selection - but this is the shortest path to your goal.

Chris

Hi, Ronald -

Seems to me what you are trying to do is really easier than all this.

1. Click on the Ellipse Select tool to get your oval selection. 2. Click on the little "Feather Edges" checkbox in the "Ellipse Select" tool. You can experiment with the "Radius" setting to get the amount of shading you want. 3. Select your oval - a bit larger than the picture because the shading tends to center on your selected boundary.
4. In the Select menu at the top of the window, pick "Invert". Now you have marching ants around the oval and also around the entire image. 5. CTRL-X (Cut).

At this point you have your oval the way you want it .

What you really wanted to know, though, is that the annoying checkerboard really indicates a transparent background.

It's replaced by white if you simply Save As yourPicture.jpg.

The JPG save will complain about that b/c jpg does not handle transparency, and when you save it the "transparency" checkerboard automatically fills white.

There are subleties here that you will find interesting.

If you right-click in the Layers, Channels box, a menu appears with a bunch of submenus. Select the Layers menu, then the Transparency submenu, and you will have a menu item saying Remove Alpha Channel. Click that, and your white background appears for you.

You can get it back by following the same selection, and then you will find the Remove Alpha Channel menu item gray, and you can now Add Alpha Channel.

If you want to save your portrait in a form that can show up on a webpage with a colored or patterned background, export to PNG rather than JPG.

Have fun, tho - that's what it's all about.

On 03/30/2012 05:08 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

In message,
Stefan Maerz wrote:

On 03/30/2012 03:19 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

Anyway, a relative just sent me an old old family photo that some nitwit, perhaps a generation or two ago, did some seriously violence to with a pair of scissors. To salvage this one and to make it look presentable I really need to be able to take the scan I have of it and crop it into a oval shape. (Yes, it is a portrait.)

P.P.S. For bonus points, somebody please also explain to me how to fade the edges of the oval slowly to white. that would be really cool, and would, I'm sure, impress the bejesus out of some of my relatives

Hi Ronald,

Gimp's user interface is a bit hard to learn at first. Just do some tutorials, and you'll pick it up in no time.

Any suggestions for which ones? URLs?

For your question, I don't know of a way to do this without the use of layers.

With the oval selected, press CTRL+X to cut it out. Then do a CTRL+V To paste the oval. This puts the oval into a "Floating Selection". It is almost like a layer, but not quite.

OK, I did what you just said.

Now a little about Gimp's interface: You have three windows. In "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo - Brushes, Patterns, Gradients" there is an area for Layers (you probably know this).

I'm still on the early/steep part of the learning curve, but yes, I've seen that one.

At the bottom of the layers area
(above brushes) and to the left is a create new layer. Press it this turns the "Floating Selection" into a layer.

Hummm... OK. Yes, I see. Now it says "Pasted Layer" next to it, instead of "floating layer".

Next you can select on the other layer (Titled "Background" by default), and delete it by right clicking and pressing "Delete Layer". At this point you should have your image as you desire.

Okey dokey. Yes. So now I got just my oval'd pic on top of the checkerboard.

Question: *Now* what the bleep do I do? I gotta put some 255-white into the rest of the rectangle that's not covered by the oval. So how do I do that? And then how do I subsequently smush my oval pic together with the outer whiteness and save the whole shebang together as a single JPEG? (Do I gotta do a "flatten layers" in here somewhere?)

(Sorry, but I really am ignorant, as you see. So even though what I'm asking is probably very basic, I still have no idea how to do this.)

Instructions for feathering (the bonus points):

If your oval's layer isn't selected for any reason select it now.

OK, hold on. When you say "select it now" do you just mean that I should place and size my oval, you know, and then just leave it with the marquee outline flashing around it? Or once it has been placed and sized to my satisfaction, do I need to do one more step, e.g. place the cursor inside the oval and then either left-click or else hit return? (I know that I always have to do the latter when I am cropping to a rectangle. In fact that's one of teh very few tghings that I _do_ know.)

Then pick the "Select by Color Tool" from the Toolbox. Set the threshold to 255(in the bottom half of the toolbox) and click on your oval. This selects your oval...

Hummm... if I have placed and sized my oval to my satisfaction, and then I click on the lttle "Select by Color Tool" icon (and set the threshold to 255) and if I then just left click inside of my oval (which still has the marquee outline blink around it) the only thing that seems to happe is that the blinking marquee goes away.

This can't be right. Is it? I'm thinking that I messed up your simple instructions somehow.

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