: PNGs made in GIMP not coming out transparent I’ve had this happen with more than one image lately. I open an image in GIMP with the purpose of making the background transparent. The first

@Sherry646

I’ve worked out why this might happen. If the Image Mode is set to Indexed Color, then the export doesn’t seem to accept the added alpha channel. So:


Image → Mode → RGB
File → Export As → imagename.png


This should now export the image with the alpha channel, and transparency.

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@Shakeerah625

There maybe one simple step you're missing, I actually did! When you export the file as a .png file, you also have a dialog box that pops up. Is the 'Save Background Color' option checked? If it is, then this is the problem!

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@Smith574

So you opened an image on GIMP and proceeded to remove background from the image.

Are these the steps you followed for the start of removing background from image:


Layer
Transparency
Add Alpha Channel


What is your next steps of following to remove the background?

Also after officially removing the background did you:


File
Export As
rename to image.png ?

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@BetL875

In case you also want to have the background transparent you will have to tell Gimp which color this is.

Therefore in addition to adding an alpha channel we will also have to convert the background layer color to transparent. If no alpha channel was defined choosing Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha... will automatically add an alpha channel with the color chosen to be transparent.

Note that this will also introduce semi-transparency in the foreground if we had not defined the background as a separate layer, which is proabably not what we wanted.

In this case to leave the foreground opaque and to only make the background transparent we have to select all the background areas (using the wand tool or the select by color tool). We can then remove the background to transparency by selecting Edit > Clear or pressing Del.

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