Copy/Pasting Losing Image Quality

[KrimLeingod]

Hey everyone,

Total novice to gimp or image editing in general. I'm trying to copy/paste an image into another image, and whenever I cut out the image and paste it, it seems to lose its color quality or something, I'm not even sure what it's doing. I'll attach a picture to show what I mean.

If you know what it is I'm doing wrong, I'd really appreciate the input!

The left side of the attached picture is the original quality, and the right side is after I cut/paste on gimp.

Thank you!

[Ofnuts]

It looks like your birds are not at full opacity so the white background shows through and reduces the contrast.

The problem could be in the image in the other tab. When you removed the black background (Color to Alpha or painting with Color erase), some of the "darkness" in the birds was converted to alpha too, making them a it transparent. To extract the birds without making them transparent:

• Fuzzy-select the background
  

• Select > Grow by a couple of pixels so that the selection includes the borders of the bird
  
• Apply C2A or Color Erase, which will only apply to the background and the edge pixels, and most of the birds untouched and so fully opaque.
  

[rich2005]

It might be as Ofnuts post, but checking Irfanview it does show transparency as black.

Your screenshot is very helpful but does raise questions. 
The clipboard brush that you get from a select -> copy is active. Only one layer ?

Are you using the clipboard brush as a 'stamp' ? That will introduce a degree of anti-aliasing, blurs it.
Sprites also have their own issues.
If you transform - that is scale / rotate ... in any way, the default interpolation 'cubic' blurs the sprite. Use the 'None' interpolation option.

This some comparisons of the above. 

   

..and for FWIW my advice is Copy then Paste-as-a-New-layer. You end up with lots of layers. Save that as a Gimp .xcf  When complete exporting as a png flattens them.

a quick animation showing that 'None' interpolation https://i.imgur.com/8xFTUrn.mp4

[KrimLeingod]

Haha thanks for the replies everyone! I actually did figure out how to accomplish what I was trying to do. Just in case anyone else ever runs into this issue, the problem for me was that I had to create a new layer group and delete the layer with the background.

A simple solution, but when you have no idea what you're doing and there are a million options in the program, it can be a daunting task haha.

Thanks again for everyones input!