Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago

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Sometimes deleting a background to transparency isn’t as simple as it seems. A good example of this would be glass. I’ve gone over various ways to delete backgrounds to transparent with GIMP in the past, but what about for more complicated imagery, like glass? In this instance, it’s not simply a matter of creating a selection around your subject and deleting everything outside of it. With glass, part of the background shows through, so we have to delete it in such a way that the background is removed from the glass, but without removing the glass itself. In this tutorial I’ll be demonstrating how to do just that.

The resources for this lesson can be located here: logosbynick.com/remove-background-from-glass-gimp

Want to learn more about how GIMP works? Check out The GIMP Series - a comprehensive collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the major tools, features and functions in GIMP and explain what they are and demonstrate how they work. Learn more here: logosbynick.com/gimp

Shout out to Photoshop Training Channel for the inspiration for this video. He originally demonstrated how to do this with Photoshop, so I figured it would be cool to demonstrate how to do so with GIMP (with my own touches added, of course.) You can watch his video here: youtu.be/n3NniavNOIM

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:54 Remove the surrounding area
02:33 Place onto the new background
03:27 Adjusting blend modes and layer masks
05:13 Distort the background
07:27 Blur the background
07:55 Apply a gradient layer mask
09:14 Final adjustments
09:40 Conclusion

Intro song: "In Da Mood" by Combustibles, used with written permission