I may not be tuned to the lingo here, though. We can stay online here, so anyone else can chime in with other tips or methods :)

Are you saying he wants to see an image of you on a white background?

So then using one of the selection tools, you could outline yourself and then hit copy/paste. Then you have an object of yourself separate from the rest of the photo (background). Select on the background area and use some of the color functions or the exposure and light functions to change it to white.

You'll likely need to select the pic of yourself and use the tool for blurring edges to soften the transition between yourself and the background. Do a soft shadow on that object, too, for a little depth : )

Make any sense yet?

Kabergs, what are you being graded on here? I'm thinking he may be after a particular technique.

Do you give him the file or the output to be graded?

'Photoshop masking' turns up a number of techniques. Looks like cut/paste counts : ) But I'd check it out against his expectations for the project.

Thanks, I'll try the cut and paste with the blur brush! I was fooling around with it for 2 hours last night, using the lasso tool and I couldn't get a clean line to cut. Does that make sense? I have a "mask" option in Gimp but no explanation how to use it with no "help" option. I thought, maybe, just maybe, you'd say "oh yes that's that I use all the time for my awesome mock ups!" LOL!

I only have to produce the finished product. No grade, just complete it. He's crazy, I'll use this to teach high schoolers math, right???? Grrrrr......

Thank you again, I know you're really busy and I appreciate you taking the time to answer my post!!!

kabergs, the key with the lasso type thing is to make sure you zoom in really close so you can really see the edges. Then you can also invert your selection with most programs so that you have now selected everything but yourself and then just cut that to remove and you will have yourself with no background. Just another way to do it. Does Gimp have an "edge finder" tool? Sometimes I think freehand is the easiest though because they often find the wrong edge anyway.

Thank you both! I got it! I was able to use this lasso type tool and went from there. It was cool, you clicked to make little "vectors/points" in the path and connected...almost like connecting the dots, then I just filled in w/ white. It was very helpful to zoom in to see the pixels.

That does sound like a silly assignment, doesn't it. Glad you finished it!

Oh, all of them are like that for this course...complete busy work. It drives me insane to have to waste time like that.