Silhouetting and Cropping the Car.

We are now going to proceed with silhouetting. However, before doing so, we have to check something. If the Colours palette is not visible, it should be displayed by clicking on the Toggle Colour Palette button; make sure that the background colour is White. This is the colour that will appear after silhouetting. More important, it will be used for the transparency colour, as you will see later on.

1. Click on Selections, Invert, or press the Shift+Ctrl+I keys.
   
   
The selection now surrounds the setting, and not the object, as shown in Figure 5.



Figure 5: The background has been selected by inversion. Note the outline of the external edges of the image.


2. Click on Edit, Cut or press the Ctrl+X keys.
   
   
The object has been silhouetted (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The silhouetted car.

A little touching up is generally needed. A few surplus pixels may have to disappear on the edges, for instance. The Paint Brush and Dropper tools can be used to do this. There is no particular method for carrying out these retouches. It is more a question of taste and good judgement.

Now all you have to do is crop the image to limit the background to an absolute minimum:

1. Click on the Selection tool and draw a rectangle around the object.
   
   
2. Then click on Image, Crop to Selection.