Created attachment 164875 [details] this is what I would like to have natively in LibreOffice It would be nice to have a built-in feature in LibreOffice Impress to make pasted images transparent so that the degree of the transparency changes over the image. For example, the left side of the image is totally transparent and the right side is totally opaque. This could make slide illustrations blending into the background more nicely. See the attached sample.odp. Currently this can be done only in external editors, like GIMP, and it is not easy there either. In the attachment screenshot.png you can see that the Properties dialog of the image already has two Transparency settings. One for the Area, which is visible where the image is transparent. This can change gradually, for example along a linear gradient. By contrast, the other Transparency setting belongs to the Image itself rather than to the Area behind the image. Unfortunately, it is just a percentage value valid for the whole area of the image, without any gradient. Here is where I would like to see similar gradient settings like we already have for the Area.
Created attachment 164876 [details] this is where the feature should be
Currently opacity is applied to the background of an image element, same as for all other graphic elements. For an image this is only visible, if the image itself has transparent parts. That is demonstrated in the attachment. We have already the "Filter" as image-manipulating feature. I see this "feature" as a relic from the early days of StarOffice, 25 years ago, when there was also an image editing module integrated. I dislike the idea to add another image editing feature. Nowadays we have excellent image editing applications, even free, that I see no necessity to add such feature to an office application. Instead, I would rather advocate removing the other image editing capabilities from LibreOffice. Having a feature always mean, that it needs to be maintained, which binds developer capacity. And for doing similar inside LibreOffice, there exists two workarounds: A) You can put the transparency gradient on the text shape. B) You can convert the image "to contour" and apply a transparency gradient then. And for a quick access to an external image editing application, the context menu of an image has got the item "Edit with External Tool". So my take for this is a "wont fix".
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #2) > ... we have excellent image editing > applications, even free, that I see no necessity to add such feature to an > office application. Instead, I would rather advocate removing the other > image editing capabilities from LibreOffice. I second this view to 100%
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #2) > And for doing similar inside LibreOffice, there exists two workarounds: > A) You can put the transparency gradient on the text shape. > B) You can convert the image "to contour" and apply a transparency gradient > then. > > And for a quick access to an external image editing application, the context > menu of an image has got the item "Edit with External Tool". > > So my take for this is a "wont fix". Thank you for your feedback, Regina. I am not sure I understand your solutions. Could you add sample files or a step-by-step description of what you mean by A) and B), please? The problem with an external editor (like GIMP) is the following. If I change the transparency of an image in GIMP and put the result into the Writer document then the transparency cannot be changed in the future any more. A co-author needs the original image and they need to recreate the image with different transparency. By contrast, if transparency could be adjusted within Writer then a co-author could change the parameters of the transparency within Writer. I think this is a huge difference that is worth the extra development. If you say that the core developer team has no capacity for implementing and maintaining this feature then I understand it. But in that case, there is another solution that should be considered. It is a huge development but it would sky-rocket the capabilities of LO. It would be nice if LibreOffice would be able to receive 3rd party filters (aka. add-ons). That is, LO should specify an API for how the images should be handled. Such a filter add-on could be the transparency setting. A user, who has the installed filter, could specify the opacity of different areas of the image. If the co-author wants to edit it, then they need to install the same filter. If somebody doesn't want to install the filter then they will see the original (unfiltered) version of the image with constant default transparency. If there was such a filter functionality, my old dream also could be achieved. LO could replace hi-resolution images during everyday work and show the final resolution of it if it is explicitly requested. This could speed up the editing phase tremendously. There could be a filter repository for LO, like there is one for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/