Hello all, from Washington DC --- absolute newbie here, been doing audio editing forever and now the boss thinks I can transfer my skills over to graphics ("It's just a computer, right???")

So here's my situation, and to most, it's incredibly simple: I'm to create an image of a huge baseball player standing behind the US Capitol building. I have a pic of each on hand, I know I'm supposed to "cut a slot" along the roofline of the Capitol Building to stick the guy into so the sky is behind him and the building is in front of him. I also know I have to perform this task with a Layer and a Mask ... and that's about it!

The online manual tells me in technical terms what these functions are, just not how I am to apply them to this specific task. Could someone come to my aid and explain - in complete club-over-the-head-DUH! steps - what it takes to cut this slot and make this happen?

Thanks ahead of time, and please remember ... we all had to start somewhere.

Alan in D.C.

Are you trying to combine the original pictures, or are you trying to transform them into lineart or something?

If it's the first thing, you might want to try the Gimp instead of Inkscape.

But if you're vectoring it, could you provide us with the pictures to get a better idea of what you're talking about?

1. Add the building image.
2. Add the player image.
3. Draw a shape which encompasses the part of the player you want to keep. Use the Bezier and Node tool for this.
4. Hold Shift and Select the player and the path with the select tool.
5. Object -> Clip -> Set

Current SVN builds feature on-canvas clip/mask editing, which is pretty handy for stuff like this.

If you got 0.46 and want to keep it easily editable, you can do it like this:

1. Add the building image.
2. Add the player image.
3. Draw a shape which encompasses the part of the player you want to keep. Use the Bezier and Node tool for this.
4. Clone the shape via Edit -> Clone -> Create Clone (Alt+d). Now the clone is selected (see status bar).
5. Hold Shift and click on the player image to add it to the selection.
6. Object -> Clip -> Set

Edit the original shape and the clone (which is used as clip path) is updated automatically. To make things easier set its fill to none and its stroke to something thin and semi transparent (try a bright green or a saturated red for this).

At the end you can either delete the original (ensure that File -> Inkscape Preferences -> Clones -> When the original is deleted, its clones: Are unlinked is checked), lower it to the "floor", or simply set its stroke to none.

Edit: By the way Firefox3 is unable to render SVGs with clip-clones correctly (regression).

That just cuts out the player. To actually place the player in the image you also need to trace the shape of the building he'll be standing behind using and . Then duplicate the bldg image (ctrl-D), send it behind the traced outline, select both the duplicate and the outline and do object->clip->set. Now move the clipped bldg to the top (home). If you didn't move it after duplicating it, it should still be aligned with the original image and look essentially like an untouched original image. Now just move the cut-out player image behind the clipped-bldg and you're done.

This screencast by heathenx might be useful, though it's not exactly the same thing you're trying to do.http://screencasters.heathenx.org/episode-009/