A slight change of pace for me – a GIMP tutorial. I don’t use GIMP a lot but I’ve found a lot of my experience with Photoshop is transferable. This is one such case. In Photoshop I would have gone to Select > Color Range then used the selection as a layer mask.
In GIMP the process is similar. You just have to know where to look. Turns out it’s in Color > Color to Alpha. There you can choose a colour or use the eye dropper to sample from the image and that colour will be turned transparent.
This was all inspired by this work by the very talented Tordo on deviantART:
I was struck by the patterned sky and wanted to try it out on a photo. Since I was using Ubuntu at the time, I thought i’d see what GIMP could manage. Turns out, as described above, it managed rather well.
So today I decided to document the process in GIMP with a video tutorial. My first time recording a tutorial in Ubuntu, too – it went very smoothly. I might have to do more for GIMP in future.
Update
I’ve remade the tutorial with Photoshop. Same images and everything, just how you’d go about doing the same thing in Photoshop.