Setting the background to transparent using GIMP - image

Using GIMP 2, I have an image of a grey chair on a white background, as below:
I now want to set the background to transparent. Therefore, I decided to use GIMP's "Color To Alpha" tool. So, I told it to set all pixels which are white (255, 255, 255) to transparent, as below:
This did set all white pixels to transparent. However, it also set the grey pixels on the chair to be partially transparent, as below:
So when I export this image and place it in front of a background, there is no white box around the chair -- but the background partially shows through the chair.
What am I doing wrong?

First, this question is offtopic here, and should be on https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com .
Second, it is trivial enough just to answer: the color to alpha plug-in is not there to turn a single color, as seem on the image, to transparency: it is a sophisticated plug-in that will remove one color of your image in a way that, if you lace the new image over a background of the same color the color you removed, you get the original image back.
Thus, in your case, it removed the "whiteness" of your chair, transforming all pixels to different opaque shades of black - so that when placed over white, you get the original image.
To simply remove the white, you have to cick on the Select By Color tool (by default th 5th icon on the toolbox), click on the white background to have it selected, and then just edit->cut. (It won't work if your image layer does not have transparency to start with - if that is the case, prior to edit->cut do Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel).
If you get aliased borders, then, after edit>cut, but prior to dismissing your selection, you can do Select->Border... by 1 or 2px, and then use the color to alpha filter with White on this selection.
For more information on Color to Alpha, I have this other answer its use and comparison with edit-cut here: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/28058/gimp-color-to-alpha-is-not-selectable/28097#28097

Just use a selection to restrict the action of Color to alpha where it matters: backgroundand edge pixels:
Select background with fuzzy select
Select>Grow by one pixel so that the selection ofverlaps the edge pixels
Color>Color to alpha

Related

Why does Angular Material use alpha to create grey colors?

I've noticed that in angular material when they need a grey they take black and then adjust it's alpha to be lighter. For example if you go here: https://material.angular.io/components and inspect any of the cards on the page, you'll notice the body paragraph has the font color rgba(0, 0, 0, .54);. Does anyone know why they choose to create greys by taking black and adjusting the alpha this way as opposed to just using hex or rgb? The only thing I can think of is that it helps support the warm and cool themes.
From https://material.io/guidelines/style/color.html#color-usability
Do: Using opacity instead of shifting colors often creates better contrast and relative luminance. For example, gray text (#727272) becomes hard to read if the background color changes to magenta.
Don't: Shifting to gray instead of decreasing contrast on black often lowers the relative luminance, making typography unreadable.

Detecting anti-aliased or undersampled text image

I have an image that is essentially a text document (black and white) but due to anti-aliasing/undersampling applied during scanning, the image contains a lot of color, light tone pixels and is thus saved as a full-color image i.e: takes a lot of space.
My goal is to be able to detect Black and White image candidates in order to convert them from full color to B&W which dramatically reduces their size.
Is there a way to detect such anti-aliased/undersampled images? Doing color pixel analysis doesn't help because the colored pixels end up being close in amount to the black pixels... Essentially I want to be able to detect that the colored pixels come from anti-aliasing/undersampling a black & white image and not from a picture type image.
Here is an example image:
As you can see there are many more colors than just black. However this image is a good candidate for Black & White / Greyscale conversion instead of full color. How can I detect such images? Please note that in this example the colors tend to be on the grey side but there are many cases where they are cyan or brown etc.
I think it is a valid question. I don't have 50 reputation to post a comment so I will post this as an answer.
Basically, in a black and white anti-aliased image the various grey colors are opacity differences of the black color. If we observe those pixels they will be like these listed below. So, if the operation is a color manipulation then apply the same opacity picked up from those grey pixels to the new color.
rgba(0,0,0,0.6)
rgba(0,0,0,0.9)
rgba(0,0,0,0.5)
rgba(0,0,0,0.9)
rgba(0,0,0,0.6)
rgba(0,0,0,0.1)
rgba(0,0,0,0.5)
In my opinion, the pixels other than grey, in this example image, cyan and brown as it appears can be safely ignored because they seemed like not part of the original text. If there were a few more example images of non grey pixels would have been good. But if we cannot ignore them just need to get the pixel opacity and apply the same color manipulation. In other words we treat them as black pixels.

a black image's color can not be changed in Unity

the color of a black image , or the black part of a image, can not be changed.
I set the image's color to red, but the image is still black.
Is that a desired feature?
What i want is , the image is changed to red.
the Unity version is 5.0.1f.
I am using the new UI.
To understand the source of the problem, you have to understand how "changing colors" work. It's nothing but a simple multiplication. In RGB terms, "black" is a vector of (0, 0, 0) — and it's pretty obvious, that whatever you multiply the 0 by, it stays black.
If you want the template image to be able to change to any color, use white.
To modify colours in a more complex way, you have to understand how the Color property of a Image component works. UI system hides a lot of complexity underneath (and it's good). Basically, Color modifies the vertex colours of a mesh. Since you don't usually specify a material, a default sprite material is used, and it uses a default sprite shader. And inside this shader, when it paints the pixels on the screen, it multiplies the vertex colours by the texture colour sampled at this pixel, and that's how it produces the end result. If you want the colours to be combined in a different way, you'll have to write a custom shader — which is really not as hard, but you probably don't need it for what you're trying to do in the scope of this question.
Black stays black.
White, however, will change with whatever Color you choose, so if you use an image editor and make your image be white instead of black, the image can then be whatever color you choose within Unity.
Check to see if your image has an alpha channel. You can do this with GIMP or Photoshop. If it does, then check your shader/material to ensure that it's set to transparent/diffuse (and not just diffuse). Diffuse only doesn't apply the alpha property to the material.
Also, it doesn't look like you assigned a material...
Make sure you have used yourImage.canvasRenderer.SetColor.
For example:
damageAnim.canvasRenderer.SetColor (new Color (255, 255, 255, 255));

Automatically choose appropriate gray color for a given background color

I have a table in which the cells may contain normal and grayed-out text. The color for normal text is chosen dynamically according to this post in order to take account that the table's background color is theme-dependent. Now I'm wondering if there's any good way to determine an appropriate "gray" color based on the table's background, so that:
the "gray" is "really" gray when the background color is white or black
the grayed-out text is readable with all possible background colors
if possible, the grayed-out text should be distinguishable from normal text, and ideally look "paler", in the same way that gray is paler than black
Note: Other styles, such as strike-out, are not appropriate in my case, since the gray color is used to convey the idea of a table cell being "less important" than others, rather than being obsolete/unavailable/etc.
Well, your linked question selects only one of two text colors: it will be either black or white.
Did you try to just use a "dark gray" when the text color is black, and a light gray when the text color is white?

NSColor transparency on black background?

In the background of my view, I draw a light blue color. And in the middle, i have a square box that is supposed to have an even lighter gray in it that has a 20% transparency. But for some reason the transparency is on top of a black background instead of a blue. I'm sorry If i'm not being clear.
You're probably using the wrong compositing mode to draw the smaller box. Show us your code.

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