Extreme Frustration With GIMP

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I am not a graphics person. Also can’t afford to hire one.

Trying to follow instructions at https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-separate.html

I use the “intelligent scissors” just like they say, spend quite a bit of effort doing so.

Then click the foreground select tool – just like they say – and suddenly everything I did with the intelligent tool is undone.

WTF?

Does anyone know of an actual GIMP tutorial for removing background that doesn’t cause me to throw a damn brick through my monitor?

Photoshop makes it easy, but clearly GIMP developers have a completely different philosophy on how a graphics tool should work and I can’t figure out what their philosophy is.

4 thoughts on - Extreme Frustration With GIMP

  • Use the intelligent scissors as you did. Right click inside the section and choose copy. Right click anywhere and choose Edit -> Paste As -> As New Image. This should get you off to a good start. Here is a link to GIMP
    communities who can better assist you learn the GIMP way and would love to here your input on the UI as well. I am not a graphics person either but this method has been the simplest

    https://www.gimp.org/links/#clubs

    — Fred

  • I saw Fred’s later reply and am glad someone knew how to do it. I feel your pain, the gimp documentation isn’t always the best. If you aren’t already aware, when your work is suddenly undone, remember that Ctrl-Z (UnDo) is your friend. I found that I had to look for gimp tutorials on the web wherever I could and use the one that worked (as you discovered – not all do). And then there were cases where, like you did, posting on a forum produced far better results than hours of web search.

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  • Alice Wonder wrote:

    Don’t do that, does nasty things to a budget.

    Don’t know a tutorial, either, and their tools do operate in an, um, interesting manner. That being said… I dunno if I’ve used the intelligent scissors tool, but I’d expect to use a select tool, *then* a scissors.

    Feel free to talk or rant to me offlist.

  • Well, I mis-spoke, Ctrl-Z can undo some things, not others. Sorry.

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