To create my Xmas photo I used a background photo from the sunny mountains outside Baguio City - Philippines. Days before we enjoyed 2 beautiful sunny and clear days - the first day was foggy and unfit for photography - the next two days sunny and hot.
Xmas e-Card and Xmas wallpaper are made of the foreground and background components. This pink rose as background first needed to be resized to a smaller size.
- I chose to resize to 480x360 px
- next step is to safe all in gif format to allow transparency
- then I used Gimp with the fuzzy tool to cut off the background.
To get the photo with transparent background - go in Gimp menu to:
layer - transparency - add alpha to channel
then from your Gimp toolbox use "Fuzzy select"
move on the background you wish to remove, left-click your mouse - move around with your mouse-pointer on the background area of the photo and practice until the borders of the rose are cleanly selected. The cleaner the difference between object to preserve as object and background to remove - the easier it will be to use the Fuzzy tool. keep such background to foreground contrast in mind when making photos you eventually might want to manipulate later on. It is easier to control background to foreground contrast while arranging your photos than to make hundreds of tiny manual corrections later on if the color flows from background into your object. Hence you may also consider using artificial background - a clean non-glossy cardboard with either a dark or bright clean color - the opposite of your foreground object to make later manipulations easier for you.
Now that your object is properly selected with the "Fuzzy select tool" use Ctrl-K to remove the selected background - now you may find a few small spots of background color left - use erase tool to clean up. The auto-crop the picture to remove any empty area around the selected object and safe your artwork as in gif format - the background should now be transparent and clean.
The next picture shows the eCard background photo I selected for my this years official Xmas message, eCard and Xmas wallpaper.
Please note
It is important to always have newest versions of all your tools and software. A year or two ago the Fuzzy tool was far less precise than it is now. All progresses months after months - specially in the dynamic world of Open Source tools. Top quality work requires top quality tools.
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