Many of the Public Domain images I upload here are black and white, but some people may want or need them to have the white area be transparent. I've been thinking I need to either find a tutorial or write my own, explaining how I make the white area transparent with
GIMP. (There is more than one way though.)
However I then thought it would be nice for people to have a way of doing this without downloading any new program if they don't want to. So I looked and found this quick and easy way to to do same sort of thing with a website called LunaPic. I am not sure if the resulting quality is as good as what I get from GIMP, but it is quick and easy.
- Choose an image from this blog and right click on it. A dialogue box should open and depending on your browser you should see an opton that says something like, "Copy Image URL" or "Copy Image Location"...click on that.
- Go to http://www180.lunapic.com/editor and find where it says, "Open from URL:" and paste the url there and click on the "Go" button.
- In the new page that has opened move the mouse cursor over the tab that says, "Edit" and then choose "Transparent" from the list that comes up.
- The page should now say, "Make image background color transparent. Click on the image color you would like to make transparent." Just follow those instructions and simply click on any of the white areas on the image. The white areas should now be transparent (showing a grey checked background where the white area was). It now will say, "Optional, adjust transparency threshold." You can play with that if you want, but I think in most cases you won't need to.
- Now on the left of the screen are a bunch of icons. Look for the one that looks like a floppy disk (hopefully you know what that looks like even though we don't use them much anymore). Click on that to save the image. It will open a new page giving you many options. Click on where it says, "Save as PNG." It will automatically start downloading and the file name seems to start with the words "imageedit..." You can always rename this file later.
Where it saves the file depends on your browser's settings, but it will usually be a folder called Downloads.
I hope that helps. I will try to get something up for how I do this with GIMP sometime.
