I have some gifs and I wanted to erase the red in it.
I have done this before with MS Paint but I no longer have that.
I went online and tried to download some freeware, like the GIMP but none seem to have this feature. Problem is the GIMP, Paint (that comes for free etc) all erase a particular color, they don’t erase similar colors. For instance the red is not only red it’s like 50 shades of red too. In MS Paint I used to be able to erase all the red or near red pixles.
In other words red on a computer is 255,0,0. But it’s also 255,0,1 255,0,2 and so forth. So far as I can tell the GIMP and the other free programs will only erase one type of red.
I tried to convert the gif to 16 colors but then it destroys the red and alters the other colors.
I don’t want to buy MS Paint because I would never use it, but I was wondering if anyone knew any freeware (Download.com or Snapfiles etc) that could do this, reasonably?
I know that Paint Shop Pro from jasc software used to have options for RGB levels. You could use it to reduce the red level to 0. It’s been several years since I’ve used it and the current software is something like Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. There’s a trial version on their website you can look at.
One of GIMP’s tools is a color selector that has an adjustable threshold. The icon in the toolbox looks like a finger touching a color square in a larger multi-color rectangle. The tool has a threshold option that will allow you to expand the range of colors that it’ll select.
To actually use the tool once you’ve selected it in the toolbox, just click on a red portion of the image, and it should select that and similar colors. Once you’ve selected the appropriate region, you can use Edit->Clear, Edit->Fill with FG Color, or Edit->Fill with BG Color to do what you want.
That wouldn’t do what the OP wants, though… That would also, for instance, turn yellow into green. And yellow probably doesn’t meet the OP’s criteria of “close to red”.
In regards to the GIMP tool, does it let you “draw” with the color-eraser? I know that the old Win3.1 Paintbrush had a version of the eraser tool that only erased a particular color, and only when you moved the eraser over the offending pixels. But that didn’t have a tolerance on the colors.
paint.net has a recolor tool which allows you to replace one colour with another (although I think it might preserve the intensity/saturation - in which case it would be more like the effect of colorizing B/W films. The tool has a ‘tolerance’ slider so you can specify how similar a colour can be and still be affected by the tool.