Rebrickable Help Guide: Editing Part/Minfig Photos

Editing Photos

Introduction GIMP	Navigation Rotate and Crop	Colour Correction Removing the Background	Save and Export Conclusion

Introduction

Many members submit Part and Minifig photos, and we are really grateful for that. However, in our Help page Submitting Images and Photos, there are a set of guidelines to ensure the quality of our photos, and sadly enough, admins have to reject many photos that do not satisfy these requirements. That is a waste of time for everyone involved.

If a photo is unsharp and out of focus, there is nothing you can do about it, apart from going back and taking another photo. In many cases issues around colour, brightness and shadows can be corrected at the time of taking the photo, This blog post provides good examples of how this can be done. I would encourage you to read this first as a good source image will make for a better image and help to minimise the amount of time spent editing. Fully removing the background is not a requirement for submitting an image to Rebrickable, but it does make for more uniform images, which some find satisfying to achieve.

With a little editing, you can turn an average image into a perfect photo, and it will only take a minute or so. You can change the image on the left into the image on the right. This tutorial will show you how to do that. Please note the start image used in this guide is deliberately bad in order to more clearly show the different editing steps. If your starting images look similar, I would encourage you to work on improving your photography as a lot of the steps below can then be skipped.

(Click on any of the images to open an HD image in a new browser tab or popup. Click again anywhere on that image to zoom in.)

GIMP

The program we need is GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or LEGO photographer, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.

The current stable release of GIMP is 2.10.32, which can be downloaded from the GIMP website and is the version that will be used for this tutorial. While GIMP will inevitably continue to be updated, the core tools have remained relatively unchanged throughout the years. This guide should continue to be useful even for future releases and will not be updated every time there is a new release.

STEP 0: Download GIMP and install it.

STEP 1: Open your image file in GIMP.
Click File > Open, navigate to your photo, and press Open. Or right click on your image file and select open with > GIMP

Navigation

After you have opened your photo it is good to get a basic understanding about how to navigate GIMP. Most of the tools used will either be on the palate to the left, or in the menus at the top. Clicking on a tool will usually open another box which has settings specific to that tool that can be adjusted.

If you are on a laptop with a trackpad, you can zoom the image by placing two fingers on your track pad and moving them closer or further apart. Zooming with a mouse can be achieved by holding down ctrl while using the scroll wheel.

To pan the image, there are so many options. There are scroll bars along the bottom and right hand sides. You can hold down the space bar while moving the cursor. If you have a track pad you can place two fingers on the track pad and move them together in the direction you want to pan. If you are using a mouse, the scroll wheel will pan the image vertically. Many scroll wheels can also be pushed left and right, this will pan the image left and right.

Have a go at zooming and panning your image to get used to the controls and figure out the ones you like best.

It is also good to remember the most useful keyboard shortcut ctrl+z which, like with most programs, will allow you to undo any mistake you might make. If you undo too many steps, then ctrl+y will redo them.

Now you can confidently navigate GIMP, it is time to get started with editing the photo.

Rotate and Crop

In most cases you shouldn’t need to rotate your image, and doing so will slightly reduce the quality of your image. This is because images are stored as rows and columns of pixels. Rotating by a non-90 degree amount means new pixels won’t align perfectly to the old ones, and the values need to be estimated. This won’t be too noticeable for high resolution images. As taking a straight photo is relatively easy, it is a good idea to always aim for that, and only rotate images when taking a straight image is not practical. Below shows an example of how to rotate an image.

STEP 2: Rotate your image.

Select the Rotate Tool, then click in the center of the part, then drag the cursor to rotate the part.

STEP 3: Crop your image.

Cropping your image is optional as the Rebrickable photo upload tool will allow you to crop and resize images at the time of upload. I normally crop my images to an approximate square so I am not wasting time removing background that can’t be seen. Select the Crop Tool, then drag around the part to the size you want, then click in the dragged area or tap enter to confirm the crop.

Colour Correction

You should always make any colour adjustments before removing the background. This is for two reasons, firstly the colour of the background will help to ensure the white balance is set correctly, and any colour adjustments made will affect the background as well as the part. If you have already removed the background you don’t want to have to do it again!

STEP 4: White balance

Most cameras are able to adjust for the colour temperature of the light being used, but if your “white” background has a yellow/orange or bluish tinge to it, it is a good idea to correct the white balance before doing further edits. The easiest way to do this is to go to the colors menu and select the levels tool. This will open a dialoge box with lots of options. On this there will be a dropper next to a white square, and if you hover your mouse over this it will read pick white point for all channels. Click on this and then click somewhere in the background of your image. This will adjust the levels such that that point looks white.

If this is not giving the desired result, you can also adjust the white balance manually. On the top tool bar there is a menu called colors, and under that a tool called color temperature. Play with the sliders until the white background is a nice neutral white. You can see in the below example that this tool has left the background image as a darker grey. This is because the pick white spot adjusts both the brightness and white balance at the same time. Using this tool only does the white balance, so brightness needs to be done seperately.

There are other tools that can be used for colour corrections/adjustments, but these run the risk of making the colouring of the part look unnatural. It is best to keep it simple and not mess with the colour too much.

STEP 5: Brightness and contrast

GIMP has a few tools that can be used for brightness. Be careful as doing this step incorrectly can wash out the colour of your part. On the right only the brightness has been adjusted, and you can see the background is still grey but the part is already starting to look faded. On the left the contrast has also been increased improving the look of both part and background. Be careful not to ovedo these settings, the part colouring should look realistic and not over-saturated.

Removing the Background

STEP 6: Use the fuzzy select tool to remove most of the background.

Your best friend when removing backgrounds is the Fuzzy Select tool, also known as the Magic Select tool, and the image for this looks like a magic wand. This tool selects all the parts of the image that have a similar colour and works great when the part is a different colour to the background. Select the Fuzzy Select Tool and make sure the mode of the tool is the default Replace the current selection. Then click anywhere on the background. A dotted line will surround the part, leaving only the part and its shadow unselected. If the dotted line eats into the part, there are two options to resolve this. You can see below some of the hands have been selected, so we need to make some adjustments before deleting the selection.

Option 1: reduce the sensitivity of the fuzzy select tool by lowering the threshold, then click on the background again. Keep doing this until the part itself is no longer being selected. You can also try clicking a slightly different spot on the background as if your starting pixel is a different colour, this can impact how much of the background is selected. If you reduce the sensitivity so much that large portions of the background are no longer being selected, then go back to when you had too much selected and try option two.

Option 2: use the Free select tool, also known as the Laso select tool, to remove the unwanted part from the selection. This works great when the fuzzy select tool has only selected a very small section of your part, such as a highlight. All of the selection tools, including fuzzy select, have 4 modes. From left to right these are: Replace the current selection, Add to the current selection, Subtract from the current selection, and Intersect with the current selection. If you forget what each mode is, hovering your mouse over the mode will remind you. The first option, Replace the current selection is always selected as default. Select the free select tool and set its mode to Subtract from the current selection, or hold down ctrl when beginning your selection. Trace the selected area you don’t want to delete by surrounding it with a loop. You can draw the loop with straight lines by clicking to place dots, or with curved lines by holding down the mouse button while dragging a shape. If you make a mistake, but don’t want to start the loop all over again, you can use the backspace key to go back one marker. You can also adjust previously placed markers by dragging them. Once you complete the loop, the contents will be removed from the selection.

Sometimes you may want to remove a second loop from the selection, but the free select tool won’t allow you to start a new loop straight away. First you need to confirm you are happy with your first loop by pressing the enter key. Once you do this, the backspace key will no longer allow you to go back and adjust your loop, but you will be able to start drawing a new loop.

Once you have made sure none of the actual part is selected, press Delete to erase the selected area, or use the bucket fill tool to make the entire selected area white.

STEP 6a: Bucket fill your background with white if required.

The photos taken on my phone are saved in .jpeg format. This image format doesn't allow for transparency, which is where part of the image is see through. GIMP knows this so when sections are deleted they go white. If you start with a .png file, pressing delete will remove the colour completely, leaving it as transparent (which shows as a grey checkerboard pattern in most image editors). To get around this you colud create a second layer underneath the one you are working on and set it to be completely white, but I find it easier to just fill in the removed sections using the bucket fill tool. When doing so make sure you have selected a pure white as your foreground colour (html notation will be all fs).

While you still have the background seleted, use the bucket fill tool leaving it set to fill whole selection.

If preferred you can leave it as transparent for now and fill in the background at the end. This is probably the way to go if you plan on using the eraser tool to tidy up the rest of your image.

Removing Shadow

In most cases the fuzzy select tool should enable you to remove most of the background, but differently coloured areas, such as shadow are often left behind.

STEP 7: Remove the shadows, or other remaining background.

Again, there are a few options for dealing with the remaining background.

Option 1: use the Eraser Tool. The eraser tool has a number of settings that can be adjusted. As we are trying to completely remove the background, it is recommended to increase the hardness to 100%. The default setting is 50% and leaves a very fuzzy edge. The other setting you will need to adjust is the size. A small brush will fit into tight spaces, but a large brush is perfect for cleaning up specs of dirt from the background that were missed by fuzzy select, or for more open edges. When using the eraser tool it is a good idea to zoom in on the area you are working on so you can have more control and visibility over what you are erasing. Erasing can be done free hand, or you can erase in straight lines by holding down the shift key. However if you want to erase straight lines, it might be easier to use option 2.

Option 2: use the free select tool to select and delete the shadows. The functionality of the free select tool has already been explained above. It can also be very useful to select any remaining shadows to delete. Make sure you have set the mode back to the default Replace the current selection. Far too many times have I made a complicated selection only to realise the mode of the tool was still set to subtract, and then I need to start the selection all over again. Once you have the shadow selected use the delete key to remove it, or the bucket fill tool to make it white.

STEP 7a: Fill your background with white if required.

If you were editing a .png image and chose to leave the background transparent while you worked on the image, now is when you should fill in your background with the bucket fill tool. As the background is no longer all selected, we will change the setting on the bucket fill tool to fill similar colours. Because we only want to fill the transparent pixels, not pixels on the image that are close to white, the threashold for this can be set to 0. Make sure you have nothing selected, then click anywhere on the background with the bucket fill tool.

Save and Export

We're done! The only thing we still need to do is to Save and Export our image. You might be wondering what the difference is between save and export. Save is mostly used for more complex edits involving multiple layers so these can be reopened and adjusted again later. This info is stored in a .xcf file for GIMP, other photo editing software may have different file formats. Export will put it back into a single flat image, the default image type for this is .png which is fine for what we want.

STEP 8: Save and Export.

Click File > Save as and save the image as a .xcf file so you can edit it later if needed. Press Save to confirm. The click File > Export and export the image as a .png using the default settings.

Conclusion

The basic techniques described above can improve part and minifig photos. The same techniques can also be used to improve the quality of MOC photos. By removing the background, the MOC will look larger and the viewer is not distracted by background details. You can also perform small changes in brightness, contrast and color distribution, to further enhance the photo.

In the example below, on the left, you see an original photo of set 71043-1 that Simon used for his review, Hogwarts - An (in)Complete and (un)Reliable Guide. As you can see, He used white cardboard as a background, and due to the size of the model, he could barely cover the entire model. Even using three 500 W incandescent lights was not enough to prevent the background from becoming light gray. Using Fuzzy Select he was able to create the image on the right. It is not perfect, there are still some remnants of shadows, if you look closely, but the final result, in my opinion, looks great.

Warning: When following these instructions be careful not to remove any of the actual part or minifigure you are trying to improve upon. Poorly edited images will always be rejected, this includes unnatural 'wavy' edges that are not reflective of the actual part, and images with parts that have sections erased. Also, make sure your image is actually in focus, has correct colors, and isn't too light or dark, before doing all the work to remove backgrounds. A bad photo will always be rejected even if you have removed the background.

If, after reading the tutorial, you have any questions, feel free to post them in our Forum.

Last modified June 8, 2025 by icedragonj

Resource	Value
User CPU time	82.340 msec
System CPU time	5.821 msec
Total CPU time	88.161 msec
Elapsed time	109.986 msec
Context switches	197 voluntary, 40 involuntary

HELP - Editing Part/Minfig Photos

Editing Photos

Introduction

GIMP

Navigation

Rotate and Crop

Colour Correction

Removing the Background

Removing Shadow

Save and Export

Conclusion

Time

Resource usage

Browser timing

SQL queries from 1 connection

Log messages