SOS help with a couple of tasks

[Greenmoon]

SOS: Please could someone help a first time user? There are .jpg photos of drawings I took pictures of, and need to put a white background on a black-ink flower design. Then I have Water-element Tai-Chi motif and between its wavy lines I want to place a title of a text that can bend according to these lines.

[rich2005]

To be honest one problem is MacOS and that not making use of Gimp very transparent. Gimp can be used very successfully as-is and extended by use of scripts and plugins. You need to know where those 'extras' go. Next some of the more useful ones might not be available / work with MacOS.

For changing the background, this is a subject which comes up frequently and there are as many methods as questions. It all depends on the image, is it a plain background or patterned ? Does the original paper have a texture ? Always best if you can post a typical clip of the photo.

This is a (clip) photo of a line drawing, with a reasonably uniform background and I got a result like this 40 second animation, https://i.imgur.com/y2gbWFu.mp4 and that is using.
1. The Colors -> Levels tool see: https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-tool-levels.html
2. Increased the density of the lines Filters -> Generic -> Erode
3. Cleaned up the background by colour select. Note the increase in the threshold to get a better selection.
4. A bucket fill to fill the selection with white. (I drag-n-drop the white swatch into the selection)

Text on a curve all depends on the curve, with standard Gimp it might go like this https://i.imgur.com/l47mZrH.mp4
1. Make / Adjust a path
2. Make a line of text and with standard Gimp you will probably have to pad-out the text
3. Create a new path of text characters Layer -> Text Along Path
4. Fill the text-path as required.

If the text-path is distorted then you might need a third party plugin such as Ofnuts text-along-path plugin. see: https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-ofn-text-along-path

[Greenmoon]

Thank you for excellent instructions

[rich2005]

(10-05-2022, 08:50 AM)Greenmoon Wrote: Thank you for excellent instructions

Do not thank until you get a result ?   If you give more details then you should get better suggestions, especially on background removal.

[Greenmoon2]

Thank you Rich2005  THE PICTURES SEEM TO BE ENCLOSED AND I DID SOME WORK ON THEM ALREADY TO MAKE THINGS SIMPLER. THE FIRST IS A YAK-TYPE ANIMAL THAT USUALLY HAS VISIBLE HORNS. IT  NEEDS DIFF. SHADES OF GREY CHOSEN FROM THE EXISTING BACKGROUND AND THEN FILLED. THE "BUCKET FILL" I COULD NOT FIND YET.

THE SECOND IS WHAT I CALL A WATER ELEMENT PHILOSOPHY" EMBLAM, AND BOTH ARE DONE BY A TIBETAN ARTIST, SO I ASKED HIM IF HE DID NOT MIND IF YOUR TEAM WOULD LIKE TO KEEP THE DRAWING AS USEFUL SKILLED ARTWORK, AND HE SAID THAT IS OK.

I WANTED TO PLACE JUST A STRAIT-LINE TITLE IN BETWEEN SOME LINES OF THIS SECOND PICTURE, AND THEN ALSO IMPORTANTLY FOR A BOOK COVER, I WANTED TO STRETCH IT SO IT PRINTS AT 7" X 9". I HAVE JUST DOWNLOADED LIBRE-OFFICE TO FORMAT THE PEACE-BUILDING BOOK I WORK ON,  SO I GUESS THIS GIMP WILL BE MY MAINSTAY.