Creating transparent images using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) ...

INTRODUCTION:
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a very powerful image manipulation software available for Linux operating systems. While working on one of client project which is a Rich UI application, we felt the necessity of inventing customized icons of our own at lot of places. The key challenge was to find a tool for helping our cause. After scanning through a stack of softwares available free / commercial; we found GIMP to be the most interesting of them all.
Two of the prime requirements for creating icons are to have a control over exact icon size and the graphic transparency. Following are the steps for creating transparent images using GIMP:

STEPS:
1. Open GIMP application
2. Click File -> Open
3. Select and load the image from the disk.
4. Zoom into the image for better accuracy while making it transparent.
5. Click Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel
6. Make sure to select the Fuzzy selection tool from the main window toolbar for GIMP
7. Selectively click the section that you want to make transparent
8. When you are sure that this section is highlighted properly, then click Edit -> Clear or simply hit 'delete' from keyboard.
9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 until all the sections are made transparent.
10. Finally save the image File -> Save.

Hope these steps will be very helpful to everyone, especially if the application demands heavy use of images and icons.