196 CHAPTER 5 (Affordable web hosting) SELECTION Highlighting Foreground Objects
196 CHAPTER 5 SELECTION Highlighting Foreground Objects What can you do with a selection, besides copying it and pasting it somewhere? Pretty much anything, as it turns out. Nearly all of the GIMP s operations will operate only on the selection, if one exists. For instance, GIMP s brightness tools, discussed in Chapter 2, will lighten or darken only the selected part of an image. Figure 5-28 has a background that distracts from the flower in the foreground. Can GIMP de-emphasize the clutter to make the subject stand out more? Figure 5-28. Nice flower, distracting background First, select the flower using any combination of the techniques already discussed. Select by Color gets most of it, and correcting with the QuickMask fills in the rest. Then invert the selection: since the goal is to change the background, you want the background selected, not the flower. Now bring up your favorite brightness tool. In this case, Curves is particularly helpful, because it lets you reduce the brightness of the white wall with respect to the green leaves (Figure 5-29). After darkening the background, you may also want to try blurring it a bit with Gaussian Blur (see the section in Chapter 6 on Gaussian Blur for more details).
If you are in need for cheap and reliable webhost to host your website, we recommend http web server services.