How to include a semi-transparent image in Gimp 2.8

In this tutorial we are going to see how to include a semi-transparent image inside another image in Gimp. I've had to do some research to do this with Gimp and from the Internet the tutorials that I have seen are ambiguous and with few explanations.

For that reason in this post we are going to see how it is done from the beginning so that it does not happen to you like me and having to spend hours looking for information about it. By the way which is better Gimp or Photoshop? In the previous link there is a very interesting article on the subject.

Include a semi-transparent image in Gimp 2.8

The first thing we have to do is the following. The distro I use for the installation is Ubuntu 12.04.

In the terminal we include:

sudo apt-get remove gimp-plugin-registry

Now we add the PPA repository where the Gimp 2.8 is located. Valid for Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 11.10 and we install

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

If we have Gimp 2.6 installed, updating is enough:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

With that we update version 2.6 to 2.8 with all the new advances.

Now that we have Gimp installed and updated, we proceed to add the layers dock in the toolbox. For this we go to the menu above in Windows > Embeddable Dialogs > Layers

layers

As we see in the image above, we grab the boxes icon with the pointer and drag it to the section of the tools window.

When we have the Layers resource in our toolbox we go back to the menu above in Archives > Open as layers and we include an image in transparency (this image is obtained from Colours > Color to Alpha in the options menu.

add transparency

Once our image has been added, it only remains to include the level of «Opacity» to make it semi-transparent to our liking. In the case of this icon we have left it at 20.6 opacity as we see in the following image.

semi-transparent image

And that's it, in this simple way we already have our semi-transparent image with the latest version of Gimp 2.8.


4 comments, leave yours

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  1.   elav said

    Very good tip Pedro Mendez .. Welcome here !! 😉

  2.   Joel said

    Excuse my ignorance, but what is one image used for within another? Don't you just put the image on a second layer, lower the opacity and then export the image?

    1.    elav said

      That is why I do not like doing Inkscape or GIMP tutorials, because everyone has their tricks and shortcuts to do the same 😀

    2.    Pedro said

      I think an image inside another is the same as a second layer, but as Elav says, each teacher has his booklet 🙂