If you are passionate about graphic design or if you have had to make an audiovisual presentation, surely you have needed to know how to make a transparent background to an image in Inkscape to adapt that image that is perfect to accompany your work, but with a background that does not you like.
Today we bring the solution to this problem, because those details can make a big difference. With this short but effective tutorial you will be able to adapt any image for your presentations with minimal effort and in a short time.
What is Inkscape for?
Inkscape is a program that allows you to modify vector images such as those downloaded from Freepik or Pixabay; as well as it also allows us to create and modify logos, diagrams and illustrations. This makes it as useful a design tool as Illustrator, CorelDraw or Freehand, and compatible with XML, SVG and CSS standards.
This tool was born in 2003 as a fork of Sodipodi. Since then, Inkscape works on various operating systems, including Windows, Unix, Mac OS X and others; and is freely available in multiple languages.
In Inkscape we can work with strokes, text, patterns, gradients and shapes, and it also allows us to open files with the .AI extension without Adobe Illustrator. This program is an easy tool to learn to use, with a consistent and versatile interface.
Steps to make a background transparent in Inkscape
In this section we have the simple instructions that you must follow step by step to make a transparent background to any image in Inkscape, and thus obtain a quality illustration that will look more professional in your presentations.
- The first thing we must do is open Inkscape, and open the image to which we want to put a transparent background in the program. We can achieve this by pressing the ‘Ctrl’ and ‘O’ keys at the same time, which will open a menu that allows us to choose the file we want to open.
- Now with the image open, we go to the ‘File’ menu (located at the top left of the window) and choose the ‘Document properties’ option. Another way to do this is to press the ‘Ctrl’, ‘Shift’ and ‘D’ keys at the same time, and the same window will open.
- We click on ‘Background Color’, and a small window appears with cyan (‘R’), magenta (‘G’) and yellow (‘B’) bars, and a last bar with the letter ‘A’ which has squares in different shades of gray. Each bar has, to the right, a space with the numerical value of the color.
- We go to the space next to the ‘A’ bar and put a number zero there. Another way to do this is to drag the mouse across the bar until there is a zero in the box next to it. With this, the background of the image will be made completely transparent.
- Once the background is ready, we close the windows that we use to see our image again.
If you don’t want your background to be completely transparent (that is, invisible), you can try adjusting the values ​​of the different bars, both the color bars ‘R’, ‘G’ and ‘B’, as well as the transparency bar ‘A’ , until you get the result you had imagined.
This process can also be done in other graphic design applications. Although it is also simple, it can be quite different from how to put a transparent background on an image with Gimp, or with the brush tool in Corel Photo Paint.
How to extract image from Inkscape?
Since we have our image with a transparent background, we would only have to extract it from Inkscape in the format you prefer, so that we can use it wherever we want. This is a quick and easy process, which we describe below.
We go to the ‘File’ menu and select the ‘Export bitmap’ option, this opens a new tab where we can choose the format in which we want to save our image. Another way to do this same process is to press the ‘Ctrl’, ‘Shift’ and ‘E’ buttons at the same time.
We hope that with these simple instructions you will be encouraged to design your next presentation, or your next job, using some images that you thought would not work for you because they had an inappropriate background. And don’t forget to share the information on your social networks!
