Cropping with Gimp 2.8! ♥

Hey dudes! Soooo, recently I learned a lot of cool photo editing skills using the program Gimp2.8. For those of you that don't know what that is, its just a lesser (some would say better) version of Photoshop. People like me that don't need all those extra crazy editing tools will find Gimp much easier. And even lesser version of Gimp is Photoscape, so I you don't care for difficult photo editing, download that!~

Now, I see a lot of picture on tumblr of photos with transparent backgrounds or clips of  part of a photo and I've always wondered "How do they crop that out?". So I'm going to show you how to simply crop a photo like this:

In this picture I cropped out the body of a character from one anime and put it on top of a another picture as a joke for tumblr! It was really easy once you get the hand of it! I hope by following this you can learn how to crop too!

Now to start, simply Google 'Gimp download' and download the latest Gimp. I have the 2.8 version. (If you need help with that message me in the comments).  When that's done it should look like this when you click on it: 

Now that its open, go to File > Open.

Click Open and select any photo you'd like to crop.

I have a picture of Akari for YuruYuri ♥ I suggest something easy, big, and round for your first crop!

Now that you have your picture, we want to set an Alpha Channel so that when you cut it, the background will be transparent! This will allow you to layer it on other pictures! Go to Layer > Transparency > Add Alpha Channel.

If its already there,very good! Too make sure the channel is added just look on the side bar:

Now you're ready to start cropping! To start, go to your tools on the side and select the Scissors! 

Click those little scissors!

Now, this is the hard part. You want to click around the boarder of your picture, leaving the little dots as you go. If you want a really clean, close crop, zoom in to 800%. This will help you see the very edge of your picture. If you just want to crop it quickly, leave it the way it is.

Here it is not zoomed it. Your crop won't look as nice but it will get the job done!

Here it is zoomed in at 800%! You're crop will look nicer but it is time consuming!

So now that you've started cropping...keep going! Click all around your image, only the parts you want to have cropped. The closer your dots are the better. Keep a steady hand and be patient. 

Once you have those little dots all around your picture (make sure to connect the first and last dot) click ENTER. You should get a moving line all around your picture!

Good job! You're almost done! Now that you have your line, go to Select > Invert.

Click it!

And then Edit > Cut!

DONE! You should have a picture with no background!

You're all done! Now the part that you cropped can be put on top of another picture as a layer or it can just be a cool transparent picture on your! To save it you have to Export it and save it as a .png to get the transparent background. Simply go to File > Export and save it!

I hope this tutorial was easy to follow but if you get stuck somewhere feel free to message me! I'm going to do a tutorial on how to add fonts to Gimp and how to add your cropped picture onto another! Have fun!