To Fill Area with TRANSPARENCY in the GIMP.

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1

Hello. I’m using the Gimp currently. I’m trying to use the “fill color/pattern” tool (the one that looks like a bucket of paint) to the effect of filling a certain area with transparency. I have a pinkish-gradient background layer. Superimposed over this is a fairly intricate vine-like image layer (made in Blender :))/ In this scheme, I want certain parts of the vine layer to be made transparent so the pink gradient will show through on the other side. I’ll spare most of the crazy things I’ve tried to get this to work, but the closest I’ve come was to set the “fill color/pattern” at “color erase”. Then it sort of tints the color on the vine layer to a weird merge of the pre-existing color and the pink behind it, which, sadly, results in a bluish pink mix. Not exactly what I want, needless to say.

It comes as a mild frustration to see the “eraser” tool so very easily apply transparency, but I don’t want to use the eraser! The vine image I’ve got has all these undulating leaves and twists and green bits and it would take all day to paint it by hand to transparency one pixel at a time. I KNOW the “fill with color/pattern” tool can fill an area with TRANSPARENCY. Can anyone enlighten me as to how to achieve this? Thanks,

-Anayo

2

The way I would do it would be to use a Quickmask(there’s a button in the lower left corner or Shift+Q). I would make a selection of whatever part(s) I’d want to keep opaque, toggle a Quickmask, gaussian blur(play around with settings till you find something acceptable[you can always undo]), turn off Quickmask, and finally Del(or Clear in the menu, if not a newer version). Hope this helps.

3

I figured it out… you have to fill the area with a white color first. Then bucket fill with color erase. Oh well. Thanks. :slight_smile:

4

Or you could just use CUT :slight_smile:

5

Or Clear (CTRL+K)