This technique is very useful in general. For example you can use it for blending objects into a background or for making a grungy text font.

Watch below or in high quality.

Below are some examples I’ve made previously.

Another GIMP tutorial. Based on the earlier Photoshop version showing how to get vintage colours using Curves. I’ve tried to recreate it almost exactly – even used the same photo.

The recording process went surpringly well in Ubuntu. I didn’t even need to take it into Vegas for editing. Just recorded with Xvidcap at 640x480px 30fps then added the music and fade out at the end with Avidemux.

And because I uploaded it at the full resolution, you can watch the video in high quality on Youtube if you add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL (Thanks Lifehacker).

Or you can just click here to view the high quality version.

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.