OK so GIMP...
when you're bringing the screencaps in you'll have areas around the screencap where the image just stops suddenly, because it's the end of the cap or because there's something in the way...
No fear
🙂
I'm assuming when building your image you're using layers to put the image together before flattening... now, for the image we're talking about currently (Inca Mummy Girl), you've got a nice dark background to work with for editing...
So you've got two choices here... either use a very soft eraser tool to bring away the edges and blend it slowly into the background, this is where using layers can come in handy so you can see how you're erasing and working through to the background...
Personally the eraser isn't my first choice, it can get ugly some times and be a right pain... fortunately when it comes to layers, you have another option...
familiarize yourself with the 'Burn and Dodge' tool... you may not have come across this before so here's where it is in Gimp...
Now this is a lovely tool... Burn basically means just that, it will darken down the area you're clicking on, use the tool just like a paintbrush, so you can blend away areas with highlights / background lighting and work with a nicely black background... it's also extremely useful for blending layers together when you're using transparent layers of various %'s or layers with different properties (layers marked as screen / lighten / darken and so on)
Now, the other thing this tool does usefully is the 'dodge' tool... basically exactly the opposite of the Burn tool... it lightens areas where you click to add highlights and extra light shading...
using both the burn and dodge tool successfully, you can quite nicely bring away most of the edges of screencaps, especially when you're working with layers to bring them all together...
there are some more advanced ways of blending screencaps together, using fusion masks and such... but those would require me to go into a hefty tutorial for you that would probably take up a thread of its own lol
Burn and Dodge are the two tools you should be using a lot of with screencaps, just be gentle with them and work on the layers individually, soon you'll find you're blending perfectly and doing it automatically with other styles of image
😀
hope that helped some
M
