I've been designing some custom backgrounds for a game recently, although I have little to no skill with photo editing. I've usually only used MS paint, but this particular project required tools that I could only access (for free) through the Gimp editing software.
I've no skill with Gimp, and while a lot of the functions were ridiculously useful, most of the time I'm just confused and lost in all the different tools and values. So, for a particular element of my design, I decided to export my project to a png file and do some tweaking in good ol' MS Paint.
The element consisted of black and white, and so I used a red background because I thought the sharp contrast would make it easy to remove later on. After finishing on paint, I opened the file in Gimp, pressed Select > By Color, and selected the red background. After deleting the background, I saw that there was a layer of red all around the remaining elements.
I tried increasing the threshold, but then it selects bigger parts of the element as well. It's the same issue with the magic wand tool. I don't seem to be able to cut my element away from the background. Are there any tools in gimp that could help me? Its all still greek to me, and playing around with the different functions was, unfortunately, no help.