How to Create a Transparent Gradient in GIMP

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and today i'll be showing you how to create a transparent gradient using [Music] quick before i dive in if you want to see more tutorials covering free and open source software like don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial so to start out you're going to want to open up your photo you can do so by going to file open in my case i'll go to open recent and just select this image here and i will just convert this to gimp's native srgb color space so the first step is important you want to make sure you have an alpha channel on your image to do that just come over here to the image layer in the layers panel right click on it and go down here to add alpha channel so two ways you'll be able to know you have an alpha channel number one the name of the image will no longer be in bold and number two when you right click and go back to add alpha channel it'll be grayed out once you've done that now we'll add a layer mask which will allow us to add our gradient so i'll come over here and click the add layer mask icon in the layers panel you can also simply right click and go to add layer mask under initialize layer mask 2 i'll choose white full opacity and come over here and click add make sure invert mask is unchecked by the way so now you'll see here next to the thumbnail of our image we have this white square or this white rectangle so this indicates our image has a layer mask attached to it and right now it is all white next what we want to do is hit the g key on the keyboard or come over here to the toolbox click and hold this tool group and select the gradient tool once we have the gradient tool selected i can come over here to my color swatches and click this little icon to reset my colors to black and white and i'll come over here under the tool options for this tool and make sure that my gradient color does go from black to white or white to black so you can go with any of these options here i just went with foreground to background rgb you'll also want to make sure your shape is set to linear so once you've got all that set up come over here to your image and just click and drag on your image with your mouse and hold the control key to drag and straight line mode and i'll release my mouse so now you're going to have these two end points usually by default the one on the right is going to be transparency the one on the left will be opacity if yours is backwards you can come over here and just click this little icon to reverse the gradient or click it again to bring it back to where it was so you can drag these little end points to change the point at which this is fading out i do recommend holding the control key while you're dragging to keep it in straight line mode and i'll release my mouse so once the gradient reaches this point here on the far right it's going to be total transparency if you drag this point closer to the left you'll see the transparency will be right here so everything from this point to the right is going to now be totally transparent and obviously this checkerboard background represents transparency so let me just drag this out back to where it was one more thing is that if i hover my mouse over the line you'll see that we have this little dot here in the middle i can click and drag that dot with my mouse that's actually the midpoint so this is the point at which the transparency will be at 50 percent and if i release my mouse it'll place the midpoint there so basically everything from here to here is going to be 100 opacity fading to 50 opacity and then once it hits this dot here this midpoint it goes from 50 opacity to zero so basically we are elongating the amount of time it's having to go from 50 opacity to zero whereas between these two points we're shortening it so it's just kind of changing the general structure of the fade out of the transparent gradient here so if i drag it further away from my subject you'll see the fade out will take longer to start and then once it hits this point here it'll start to fade out to total zero and the closer you bring this midpoint to either of the endpoints you'll see the harsher line you'll get here so if i drag this closer to this endpoint you'll get a pretty harsh line right there so i typically click on here and manually set this to 50 if i've moved it that way we get a nice even transition so come over here click on your gradient just click on either end point and once you're ready to apply the gradient hit the enter key and now if i come over here to my thumbnail you'll see that the layer mask now has a gradient assigned to it and it's going to be white on the left and then it's going to fade to black on the far right so anywhere you see black on the layer mask is where you get your full transparency if i wanted to export this image and include the transparency in the export i can export to a variety of file types that support that including png gif tiff or webp just to name a few examples so to do that go to file export as and you can rename your image man at sunset once you've named your image just make sure the file extension ends with whatever you want to save this as so for example png gif tiff just to name a few examples i'll stick with png you can also come over here and search through the file types and whatever one you click on it'll add the extension here automatically once you're ready click export and you can pretty much go with the default settings for png and click export again and now if i go to file open recent you'll see there is the png i just saved this to so when i click to open it there is our image with the transparent gradient all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video including a link to my 2.10 master class on udemy but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 48,523

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2022

Id: k0gMVPBQOh4

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022