Cut Out Graphics the Easy Way

So you can make your own cutouts and stickers from vintage postcards and color plates. Many universities and libraries have public domain pictures you can get for free. I've always struggled to cut them out easily until I learned a little trick that saves me hours. We'll be cutting out the background from this picture.

In every program there is a 'fuzzy select' tool. In the GIMP (which is my favorite open source code graphics program) the fuzzy select tool really is magic. It's created to work with AI and it will work magic for you. To get the most out of it you will want to add a mask and make sure the settings are about the same as the ones below. Make sure to check the 'draw mask' box.

All you do is make sure your picture is transparent so add an alpha channel to it if needed. This picture is a .jpg so it is not transparent. 

Then select the fuzzy select tool and start with the corner of the picture, click and drag the parts you want to remove toward the center. Stop or back up if you select too much. You don't want to take any pixels out of your cutout and you want a nice clean edge. Keep clicking all the background areas you want to remove. Everything under the pink mask will be removed when we hit the 'delete' key. You can hit the delete key more than once and it will feather the edge a little more OR you can increase the radius on the 'feather edges' setting to about a 6 or 7. Play around with the settings until you get rid of all the white line around the cutout.

 

Single colored backgrounds are the easiest to convert to .pngs. With practice there is no reason why you can't make your own cutouts and stickers from any public domain image you want. 

I always check my cutouts on a white and then a black background layer to make sure all the artifacts and stray pixels have been removed. It's a good habit to get into if you work with graphics. If you skip this b/w check on your graphics you will be sorry because you may have to re-do them and it's a pain in the wazoo if you already have them uploaded in one or more places. You'll have to fix them all and replace them. (it's a hard lesson).

If it looks clean then I just brighten up the image a little and save it as a .png. And that is all there is to it. It's so easy to make your own cutouts and then let Cricut do the hard work for you!