How To Fill or Delete Within A Bordered Area?

[abrogard]

I have a letter I've drawn as an image.  It is like hollow - you know?  It is a 'G' drawn like with parallel lines you know?

  And I want to clean out the area inside the lines - i.e. inside the letter itself - and clean out the area outside the lines which is supposed to be already 'cleaned out'  i.e. erased,  but isn't.

The border, the outline, of the letter is nice thick black.

 I have the idea that gimp will somehow recognise the difference between that black and select all the area within, like between the lines, within the actual letter, so's I can flood fill it or erase it - and do the same on the other side of the border and erase everything to the edges of the canvas so's I've just got the letter left.

 Is that right or am I remembering some other prog somewhere?

 Can it be done easily or do I have to go all around my letter again with the lasso or the path tool or something and make a selection that way?

[Ofnuts]

The "Magic wand" will select similar contiguous pixels, starting where you clicked, so if you click inside the outline, and the outline is completely closed (otherwise the selection will leak out) it will only select things inside the outline.

[abrogard]

Ah... called the fuzzy something now, I had to google it to find it.

Yes, I've used that in the recent past on this very drawing and the problem with it is if there is a mixture of colours you've got to keep on working at it. And I've got a great smudgy mixture.

I was looking for something that would kind of work the other way round to that. Identify the contiguous same colours you point it at and then delete everything else. Being smart enough to identify an enclosed area if there is one and delete only within it.

Doesn't matter. This is good enough. It got most of it out and I'm doing the rest with an eraser.

I'm just learning. I just put the fuzzy thing on my outline again and it all turned into crawling ants and I thought i had a selection either inside the letter or outside so I tried flood fill but it flooded the whole canvas and I tried a delete and it cleared the whole canvas.

Back to the eraser.

Thanks for your help.

[rich2005]

Have to confess, I do not really understand most of this, but then I am easily confused.

Always better if possible to give some sort of image or even part of an image.

Quote:Identify the contiguous same colours you point it at and then delete everything else.

Well that is the fuzzy select but then the selection inverted Select -> Invert

Quote:Being smart enough to identify an enclosed area if there is one and delete only within it.

That might be using the fuzzy select in addition mode.

As an example:

This image using fuzzy select as it usually starts. The mode is replace and the threshold is 15. Click in the coloured background only part selected screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/1kWpzTj.jpg

Make a more comprehensive selection by increasing the value of threshold https://i.imgur.com/bhe5cqs.jpg That selects the background only.

To select another contiguous area then put the fuzzy select tool into addition mode. The tool icon now has a '+' next to it and as the name suggests, adds to the selection. https://i.imgur.com/ldbzFu3.jpg

Now if you cut (or) fill the selection you get https://i.imgur.com/ZCMCbx9.jpg

Just a reminder: If Save-tool-options-on-exit is in force, now is the time to return those settings back to original.