How to Quickly & Easily Remove Your Background in GIMP, by Color

don't you hate it when you have a photo that you love but something about the background just isn't right and you want to remove that background and but maybe you don't know how to remove it well don't worry because today I'm going to show you how to remove a background and when you have a solid color like in this image here or maybe you have a background that has a solid color but different shades of that color like this image or maybe you have a landscape photo where you want to remove the sky because maybe it's not just giving you the Creative Vision you had for that particular image and you have a range of colors that are very similar like this guy so we have pinks and oranges up to whites and then whites to Blue so the editing technique I'm going to share with you today is going to be easy to select these parts of the image the background when you know how to use the tool properly and in this case the tool I'm going to recommend for these types of images is your select by color tool which is right here the keyboard shortcut is shift plus o now it's real easy to use but if you don't understand that you have these tool options over here and know what they're used for then it can be kind of tricky to use this tool because it's not going to give you the type of selection you want initially so if I click right here it's going to make a selection but it's not really selecting all of the yellows in the background plus it's also making a selection of her as well and that's based on the settings I have in my tool option so let's go over each one of these to figure out how to best use this particular tool I'm going to go ahead and deselect those here and the first thing we have is the mode like all our selection tools so we have the default option which is going to set your selection based on what you click on so or if you have an existing selection it's going to replace that selection with this option next we have add to the current selection if you have a selection of course and then subtract or remove from that selection and then the last one is intersect with a current selection and I've never used that so I'm not quite sure what it's used for I believe you can kind of cut through the selection that way and kind of remove from it I'm not quite sure so don't take my word on that the two you're going to use the most often are this option add to and subtract now instead of coming over here in the tool options you can use your keyboard shortcuts instead which is shift to add and control to subtract from next we have anti-aliasing which is going to smooth the edge of your selection I recommend having that always turned on feather edges it's kind of like a brush if you use a brush and you can set that brushes Edge to be a hard Edge or a soft Edge if you set it to be a soft Edge then it will be feathered from hard to soft to the end of that brush so the same concept with Feathering it's either going to make it very tight or sharp if you don't have feather edges on if you have feather edges on it's going to make it softer and kind of feather away from that edge so typically I have feather edges turned off or I have the radius very very tight like one to five pixels now that's just based on experience and it depends on the image as well so that's something you're going to have to play with to see what works best for your images now the next option here is Select transparent areas and if you have transparency in your image already then it's going to add that as part of the selection typically I don't so I have that turned off next we have sample merged if you have multiple layers in your image because you've worked on it and you've done some different types of editing it's going to sample all the layers for that color typically that's not something I do I'm just working on the layer where I want to remove that background from which is initially the beginning of the edit so I typically have that turned off and then we have threshold this is the one you're going to set the most often so what threshold does is it increases or decreases the amount of your image that is being selected based on the tool you're using in this case select by color so the higher the threshold the more shades of that color it's going to select so in s sense it will select more the higher the threshold and of course the lower the less colors or the less shades of that color it's going to select so if I bring this down to right around five or six and I click once it's going to make a selection based on that color that I clicked on and it's going to find a few shades of that color throughout the image to add to the selection now if I increase the threshold and click again it's basically selecting the entire image because the threshold is going beyond the shades of yellow and picking up other colors in the image as well so typically I like to start with a smaller threshold and what I also like to do is Click draw mask here to turn that on and I'll show you what that does in just a second we have another option here select buy and you can Target specific color channels based on the color you want to select so if you want the red or the green or the blue Channel you can select that and then it will Target those colors in that color Channel typically when I have drawn mask turned on and I have a solid color like this I don't need to change the composite because when I click it will show me in pink the pink is actually an overlay showing the area of the image that is going to be selected now I still have my left Mouse button held down if I drag down it's going to increase the threshold so now it changed to 17.6 if I scroll down again you just want to do a little bit on your scrolling it's now down to 27.1 and it has a higher or it's actually selecting more colors for me now the higher that threshold is and every time I scroll down it will continue adding to that selection the only problem though is if you go too far as you can see it's starting to select the yellow pixels in her skin they may not be exactly yellow but they're a shade of yellow and it's being added to the selection so now I need to scroll up to remove from that selection and to reduce the colors that are being selected or the shades of yellow being selected once I get to a point where there's nothing else being selected on the subject I can go ahead and release my mouse and then those colors will be added as part of the selection all right I now need to add these darker shades of yellow to my selection as well and to do that I need to hold down which key that's correct the shift key so I'm going to hold down shift click once and hold my mouse button and I get that pink overlay again the mask now I can scroll down again to increase the threshold for those colors now I'm seeing it starting to select some colors on her neck so I'm going to back off just a little bit it's added to it now I'm going to click in these little ants right here these diagonal lines here that look like dancing ants and I'm going to hold down that shift key again click and add to the selection again and just like that in three clicks I was able to select the entire image all I have to do now is Click delete to delete the background how cool is that I love it now I don't recommend deleting the pixels like I just did because it's going to do so permanently if you save your file after removing your background like this and come back to it at a later time you can't get those pixels back instead what I recommend doing is using a layer mask to temporarily hide those pixels and then you can bring them back if needed to find out more about layer masks go ahead and check out this playlist right here thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: GIMP TUT

Views: 10,389

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorials, gimp for beginners, GIMP 2.10, gimp tutorial, gimp remove background from image, gimp remove background, gimp remove object from photo, gimp remove white background to transparent, gimp remove background to transparent, gimp photo editing tutorial, gimp photo editing for beginners, gimp photo editing tutorials for beginners, gimp photo editing remove background, gimp photo editing basics, gimp select by color

Id: TGz6cqpyCDY

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023