GIMP question

Is there a way in GIMP to precisely cut something out of a photo and paste it back into another one? I've read what documentation I can find and tried various combinations with different tools but so far I've had to use a much less powerful program which doesn't do a very good job of it (it only cuts squares and rectangles). I’d like to be able to precisely cut a single image, say a vase, out and use it in another photo. I’m either missing something or not understanding what I’ve been reading. Any help would be greatly appreciated as my fingers are getting sore from erasing huge areas of photos and trying to blend.

Use the Lasso tool to outline what you want to cut out. You'll need to experiment and practice with it.

Edit->Copy (or Cut)

Open your second image, and do an Edit->Paste. I'm not sure which paste to use. Trial-and-error I guess.

I hope this helps until someone can give you better instructions.

Kitsy ^.^

Use the scissors cutting tool. It will give you a rough first cut (at the very least) and, depending on the background contrast vs the part of the image you want cut, it will even give you a very precise cut. The way I use it is to zoom in pretty close.........like 400% or greater. Pick a starting point and carefully place your "points" to encircle your item........make sure to put a point at every aburpt change in direction or colors. you well get a progressively growing selection line as you continue around your desired item to cut. Once you've encircled the part use the selection menu to invert the selection then edit to cut. If the image has an alpha channel I sometimes will put a blank colored layer behind the layer I'm cutting that contrasts so I can see if there are any little bits that still need to be removed.....and clean up as needed.

It takes a little experimenting to see exactly where to put your points along the edge of your object to cut out.......but it's pretty straight forward. Hope this helps you a little.

Thank you for your help... I'll give both a try.

My method, if it's a individual area of a picture with varying colours in the background, is to use the paths tool. Raise the picture to 1024 x 1024 and zoom-in then pick-out the outline with the path tool. If, the area has a single-colour background then that's easy: Select the area and then use the colour to Alpha method. I did a You-tube on this method and you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnWc6MIMHnk
One note on this method is that, depending on the 'purity' of the background, you may end up with a semi-tran's image. Normaly you can fix this by just doing another duplicate and merge-down.

Thank you so much Dingthat. I watched your video and took notes and will certainly give it a try when time permits.

The newish foreground select tool can be really helpful.