Sometimes, when taking photos, you spot unwanted objects bothering your photos and want to remove them. You can do it in less than five minutes with GIMP.

Brief introduction about GIMP: It is an open source image editing tool. Much like Photoshop, but you don’t need to spend a dime to get it. GIMP is available for major desktop platforms from Windows, Linux to macOS.

I have no idea why did you wanted to remove the white background of your image. Probably, you want to make background transparent since you want to blend it with other images. Just follow the steps below to remove the white background on an image with GIMP.

• First off, open the image containing a white background you want to remove. You can download the example here.

• Select the white area you want to remove using one the available selection tool. To ease your job, you can use the fuzzy selection tool. This tool will select area based on color similarity so you can select the white background in a single click. To use it, simply click anywhere in the white area.

• Once the white area you want to remove is selected, click the Layer menu and select Transparency –> Add Alpha Channel.

• Click the Edit menu and select Clear.

Repeat the steps above to remove another white areas that can’t be covered by a single selection. You can use a combination of selection tools like rectangle, circle or free selection tool to get a smoother result.

One thing to remember, if you want to turn your image to be transparent, don’t forget to export your image in a PNG format since JPG doesn’t support transparency. To do so, click the File menu and select Export As.

Give your file a name with suffix of “.PNG” and click the Export button. Done!