GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309762
Request "Remove alpha channel" menu item
Last modified: 2005-08-07 16:39:14 UTC
(Filed at Mitch's suggestion after an IRC discussion.) It's easy to add an alpha channel to the bottom layer in the layer stack, with a menu item in the layers dialog. But there's no easy way to remove alpha once it's there. It would be great if this item could be a toggle. Why? Here's one case: select the sky out of a photograph, using fuzzy or color select. It's likely feathered at the bottom. Now cut&paste the sky, or just Float it, and make it a new layer. The combination of the foreground layer plus the sky layer leaves transparent areas in the image, since alpha is multiplicative and not additive. Sure, there are workarounds, but removing the alpha channel on the bottom layer would be simpler than the workarounds.
My intuitive expectation, when I first looked at the menus, was that the Semi-flatten command would do this, by "flatten"-ing the active layer and the layers below it. Instead, it does a sort of threshold-alpha thing that is not easily discoverable and probably not that useful for most people.
Semiflatten is useful when producing images in the GIF format. It doesn't make much sense for anything else. Perhaps it should be moved to a Web menu or something.
This is related to bug 170608, isn't it?
I don't see how this is related. But that is probably due to the fact that I don't really understand bug #170608 and that I think that it should be closed as WONTFIX.
Should be easy enough to add even for someone who doesn't know much about the GIMP code. Adding the gnome-love keyword.
Fixed in CVS: 2005-08-07 Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org> * app/core/gimplayer.[ch] (gimp_layer_flatten): new function. * app/actions/layers-actions.c * app/actions/layers-commands.[ch] * app/widgets/gimphelp-ids.h * menus/image-menu.xml.in * menus/layers-menu.xml: added "Remove Alpha Channel" action, action callback, help ID and menu items. Fixes bug #309762.