All the black in my image has turned transparent, help!

[cgurneyread]

I have coloured in the background of an image black, and exported it. all was fine until i opened it again and now all the black bits are transparent, and I can't figure out how to get it back to normal, please help!

i have attached a section of the affected image

[Ofnuts]

Add a layer, fill it with black, and drag it under the layer with your partially transparent image.

[cgurneyread]

Perfect, thanks so much!

---

ok well it did work, but i've now compared it to the original image and it had made it much darker & grainier, is there another way? how did this happen? (see attachment for comparison)

[Ofnuts]

Cannot tell without seeing the image file (and even then...). Depends how you colored, and how you saved (exact options...). Black is considered the "transparent" color in some cases.

Also, why did you use BMP? this a very ancient and ill-defined format. Unless you are using the file in an application that requires it (and then you have to figure out which variant of the format it wants) you can use PNG instead.

[cgurneyread]

I can't show the whole image for copyright purposes unfortunately. I used the paintbrush to colour around the bit that i wanted, then used 'export as' with the default export settings. I used BMP because that was the original file type of the image and i didn't want to convert to JPG or PNG and loose size/quality. how can you change the settings so that GIMP doesn't think black is a transparent colour?

[Clydaler]

I kind of see what you mean by the black making the entire image a tad darker.  You could experiment with some dark gray layers to help "lighten" up the image rather than using a black layer.  It may also help with the grain that you are referring to.

Do you still have the original .xcf / project file that you were using to work on your edits?  I am not an expert with this, but one of the export settings may be causing the black to go transparent.  Like Ofnuts recommended, you could see if the problem would be resolved by exporting with a different extension like png.  The image quality may be reserved more than you think; worth a shot since you can always export with a different file extension again!

[Ofnuts]

Hmm. It looks like the image applied itself as a layer mask. Did you use layer masks?

[Clydaler]

(02-02-2018, 04:06 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: Hmm. It looks like the image applied itself as a layer mask. Did you use layer masks?

Cgurneyready made it sound like there wasn't any issues with the layer looking like a mask in the project, but the image shown in the first post definitely looks like the product of a mask.  Could the image have been imported as a regular layer but then exported as a mask?