Hey, that looks like a sunny spring day already! But the picture is somewhat monotonous. Bottom of the image that was carelessly erased in GIMP can be overlaid with a blurred white closed path to make the drawing coquettishly unaccomplished: This nonchalance rather encourages a sketchy feeling. But it looks good enough, so leave it as is. You don't need to try hard matching the objects: top of the hill isn't there on the drawing anyway. Now place the resulted bitmap (saved to a PNG file) over our vector drawing. Why make it so difficult instead of usual colorization? I didn't really measure, but subjectively Colorize tool doesn't create a visually monotonous image, while fill over a transparent layer does. Here is what you see in the end (I'm using white background here, but in GIMP you will see checkerboard of course): In Layers palette lock transparency, pick a dark green color and fill the whole layer with it. Go to Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha and use white color (that's default value) to creat transprency based on white color. Now it's time to add alpha channel to the layer. Erase details we don't need like ships on the sea and foreground object that will be covered by white color. Use Curves tool to lighten the image and increase contrast. Open it in GIMP and remove color by using Color > Desaturate tool. Now it's time to add details from the original photo. The foreground is blurred even more, because we are not going to leave it as is :) Now move away the photo:īoundaries of the background are slightly blurred to give the background an out-of-focus feeling. For the hill use a path of fresh green color falling off to white color. Carefully draw the background over the photo. So let's combine speed and simplicity of vector graphics with detail of raster graphics. What we need, however, is: bright and buoyant landscape with a light touch of conventionality. So, quite a dull picture taken with a point-and-shoot camera: noon daylight, haze, boring scenery. Presumably you have a very good understanding of GIMP and Inkscape features. The technique uses a combination of raster and vector graphics. I wrote this turorial, because readers of my blog were interested in a technique I had to invent rather out of despair to accomplish a real life task.

Inkscape transparent background 2018