Saving as gif with transparent background

Now we just need to finish her off and gif her...
Make a selection excluding as much empty space as possible using the rectangular selection tool. Now choose Image -> Crop Image from the menu.

At this point save your image as a xcf file for the LAST time... this will make sure you can always go back to the layered image to edit.

Now choose Image -> Flatten Image from the menu. Notice that there is now only 1 layer left in the layer view. (This is why you DON'T want to save at this point.)
Now try clicking the channel tab next to the layer tab. You will see 2 channels, Red Green and Blue - hence the term RGB colors.
Now we will change from RGB to indexed colors. Go to Image -> Mode -> Indexed... go with these settings:

You image should look almost the same... but in the channel view you can see the 3 channels have been changed into one indexed channel.
To make the background transparent we will need to create another channel; an alpha-channel.
Go to Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel.

The alpha-channel will allow us to delete the background color.
Get the select by color tool, click on the background color. Make sure that ALL the background and ONLY the background is selected, then press CTRL+K to delete (or Edit -> Clear). Select -> None or CTRL+SHIFT+A to deselect.
Now the background is transparent

and all we need to do is File -> Save as... and select GIF as file type.
Now open the file in your webbrowser to check her out

Voila, Gimp doll!


/end of gimp doll tutorial/

made by desdemona. email me with any comments or suggestions