So how do you highlight a part of an image using the Gimp?. My question exactly since I don’t know much about pixels inverts, color and layers this isn’t exactly easy for me to do and Googling for an answer I found people talking about inverting the selection and brushing away WTF.
Obviously the first thing I did was to open GIMP and look for the highlight button after failing I tried other image editing aps. In open office draw the help file actually talks about a highlight tool bar button but I couldn’t find it in the 10 000 other tool bar buttons and the help file didn’t specify a menu item I can use. The others like GNU paint, Xpaint and even Tux paint didn’t provide “the magic button”.
Lucky for me I have low friends in high places. So I mailed one of them who claims to be a graphic design student. What I got back can only be described as the graphic design student way of saying RTFM or Read The F***** Manual. The fact that must have slipped the mind of the friend in question is who actually helped her install Xbuntu and GIMP in the first place on her useless old G3 Mac.
I include the screen shots (without permission ;p) and some of my own comments on highlighting a part of the image in GIMP:
1. Open the image with GIMP
2. Select part to highlight
Using the Rectangle Select Tool select the part of the Image you want to highlight. After selecting with the Rectangle Select Tool the selected part will be surrounded with a box of moving dashed lines (Showed in 3).
3. Change color
The color that you want to use to highlight can be selected on the top box of the Foreground & Background colors that is located at the bottom of the main tool bar the default seems to black and white. After clicking the black box a window named Change Foreground Color will pop up. From the small notebook select the tab on the most right. In this case the yellow color was selected. The Foreground color should now be yellow or the color selected in your case. The area you want highlighted will still be surrounded in a dashed box.
4. Fill the selected area with Bucket Fill Tool
It was this step that provided the Eureka moment for me since the previous steps was obvious. Select the Bucket Fill Tool. Once selected look out for the fill settings just under the main tool bar. The trick is that the default Opacity is set to 100. It seems Opacity means almost the same as transparency except when the opacity is set to 0 the color is 100% transparent and vice versa. Select a opacity of around 30 (experiment for best effect). Select FG color fill. And select Fill similar colors, leave the rest of the settings as is. Lastly click inside the area selected in step 2 and the area should be “Highlighted”
None of this is possible in the first place without great free and open source tools like the Gimp running on a great operating system like GNU/Linux.
