Removing white backgrounds from sprites?

[Dharma Fish]

So I've been using Gimp for a long time now and I still haven't found a decent way to remove the white backgrounds from sprites I create. I have a great plugin for converting line art to transparency but it makes everything completley desaturated and areas that are not pure black become translucent. Works great on scanned in line art. My problem is that I have been using MyPaint to do a lot of my color work and it doesn't support transparencies in a reasonable fashion so I end up just selecting all the pure white pixles in gimp, deleting them and than painstakingly erasing the "halo" artifacts away from the outside lines with a soft brush which takes forever and a day. Any suggestions?

[Chorvaqueen]

Yay another GIMP + MyPaint user!

Well here's what I do.

1.) Save image in MyPaint (jpg/png)
2.) Open in GIMP
3.) Bezier tool the edges.
4.) Once done, click selection to path.
5.) Then Feather selection (around 2-3 pixels)
6.) Cut/Copy
7.) Paste on a transparent layer
8.) Resize it to your sprite size to hide the jagged edges left.

Sorry it's painstaking but it's worth it. Also note that you may have to make your sprites larger when drawing them in MyPaint.

OR

1.) Color to Alpha image
2.) Create another layer under extracted image.
3.) Start painting white under it.
4.) Use fuzzy brush for the edges

Downside of this is that the edges aren't 100% straight, also painstaking.

[Dharma Fish]

Yay another GIMP + MyPaint user!

I know, MyPaint is amazing isn't it. Glad I'm not the only one. Like your drawing by the way, I was just checking out some of your work and I like your style.

[TsukiShima]

I'm not sure how GIMP or MyPaint work, but for whatever condition, I always use Photoshop to remove them. Though I don't really know the real method, since mine still leave me with some white spots from the sprites. You'll need to use the magic wand first then the magic eraser. It can only be supported in PNG.

I'm just dropping by to help.

[Naeddyr]

If you sprites have black outlines:

1) Fuzzy select the white areas
2) Select > Grow, a few pixels at most, one or two or more
3) Color > Color to Alpha

If you don't have black borders, use smaller "grow" radius: it will make the borders slightly translucent, but it's a cheap and easy way to do it.