Graphics: Isolating An Image From Its Background

As part of a UWS “Interactive PowerPoint for Teaching” workshop I helped out at today, I was asked by quite a few people how to remove the background from a picture so that it could be integrated into a presentation more cleanly. I showed a few people some relatively simple tricks using free, open source software called Gimp. In order to make this information more widely available, I have put together a short guide on how this can be done. The guide can be downloaded here.

Of course, there are other (more powerful and complex) ways to do this, and it can be done using other applications. However, Gimp is free, and this method is pretty straightforward, making it accessible to almost all users.