Hi all. I have an image in Gimp with a main transparent area and numerous non-contiguous smaller transparent areas. When I add a background image layer, it’s visible through the main transparent area but not through the smaller, non-contiguous transparent areas. Is this normal behavior for the Gimp? Is there any way I can get the background layer to show through all the transparent areas?
I would gather some information first. Use the Colour Picker tool with the ‘Info’ Window enabled.
That will show the state of the Alpha channel. This example, the background has been removed and is transparent. The checker dots however are ‘fake’ and are opaque.
Other than that, more information required, number of layers, layergroups, RGB or indexed… A screenshot usually helps.
edit: Another common possibility, an active selection in force.
I’m beginning to understand and starting to think that what I’m trying to achieve is simply not possible for me.
Many thanks for trying to help.
If you explain what you want to do from the beginning, we could find a solution. Perhaps you are just looking in the wrong direction.
Hello and thanks for the reply. It’s very difficult to explain as I don’t have permission to put the image on the Internet! But suffice to say it’s an image of a woman with long wavy dark brown hair on a white background. I want to replace the white background with a bokeh style background image. Selecting the white background by color or Fizzy Select Tool, adding an Alpha Channel, clearing the selection and adding the background image as a layer is all easy-peasy. The trouble is that her dark wavy hair retains lots of little pockets of the white background giving something like a halo effect that that looks really ugly! I’ve tried everything I can Google and think of and have reduced the effect considerably but not enough to make the image acceptable.
I suppose it would be relatively easy to find a similar image on the Internet to explain my problem better but lets see if my description above is enough!?
G’day, mate,
You mean something like this?
There are many more to learn from: gimp cut-out hair at DuckDuckGo
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Besides the pointers by @Claes, you can try to use Colors > Color to alpha in the hair, this will make the pockets somewhat transparent.
Thanks Claes. The video solutions in your DDG link are of little value to me because I have a severe hearing disorder and they don’t mean much without the audio content. One in particular looked quite promising but it goes too fast for me to interpret and be sure what tools are being used. I was hoping to find a text based tutorial but so far no luck. My Gimp skills are quite limited!
Thanks Ofnuts. I’ve tried Color to Alpha a couple of times but that was a few of days ago now and I can’t remember what did what? I’ll re-visit today to refresh my memory!
Thanks again Claes. This looks really helpful, I’ll give it a go today!
On Youtube you can click the 
icon at the bottom and this adds auto-generated subtitles:
Also allows us E2Lers understand some strong accents 
Many thanks, I didn’t know that!
Another tip is that you could slow down the video. Weird fact is that I listen to audio at greater than 2x but often watch tutorial videos slower than 1x. Well, it makes sense when presenters do their actions too quickly or the screen resolution is too high for me to see properly.
Right at the time your message appeared I was thinking “I wonder if it’s possible to slow down YT video”? Thanks!
Hello to all my helpers. With all your ideas, I have managed to give my image a new background and the results are quite acceptable. The bonus is, I now know a lot more about using The Gimp than I did before! Many thanks!