GIMP Quick Tricks: The Fuzzy Select Tool

To start, I've opened this picture in the image window of GIMP:

In the Toolbox, on the left, I click on the wand symbol:

Here, below the tool icons, you can see the Fuzzy Tool's default settings:

With one click on the left hand in the picture, I select the whole outline of the hand:

I click edit (you can right-click on the image to call up a context menu of all the items available from the top toolbar), then "Copy":

Then I move to another image window that I've opened, click "Edit" then "Paste":

This places a copy of what I selected from the first window into the second window:

Click "Layer", because this is a new layer, then "Anchor Layer" to secure it in place and make it look like it is part of the picture in the second window. Before anchoring it, the pasted layer is floating, and can be moved around.

An alternative way to anchor it, is to hoover the mouse over the image, until you see a little anchor symbol form near the pointer, then just click the image.

One of the Fuzzy Select tool's settings is called "Feather Edge" which gives what I see as a glowing effect to the pasted image.

Feather Edge is active when you check the box in the Fuzzy Select settings:

I'm going to leave it at the default Radius setting of "10", and I've undone the previous selections that I made in the "Payoff" picture. I click it once, like I did last time, copy the selection, and paste it to the second image:

After I've anchored it, you can see that the feathered edges give it a bit of a glowing look:

I reset the Fuzzy Select tool settings to default, and undid my previous selections. I clicked the fist hand like I've done in the previous examples, then pressed the "Shift" key on my keyboard and click the second hand.

I copied my selection, nothing tricky, just copy either hand, and I get both, because both were selected.

After pasting and anchoring the selection to the second image, I get this:

Another trick, is to invert a selection.

I undid everything in the second image window, then went back to the first window where the two hands were still selected, clicked "Select" then "Invert" and copied the inverted selection.

I pasted and anchored it to the second window to get this:

For my final example, I undo everything again, then go back to the Fuzzy Tool settings, and increase the threshold to over 100. Obviously, this is an extreme increase, I'm just showing what this setting is capable of. You are going to want to make gradual increases when you are working on your own projects

I just make one click on the part of the image that looks like a stack of money:

Copied, then pasted and anchored to the second window:

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GIMP Quick Tricks:
The Fuzzy Select Tool
by CleanerLife
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.