GIMP Question

[BISHDP]

Greetings everyone,
It has been quite a while since I was last on here. I have a question, though, for the GIMP minded of us.

How does one take a finished map and extract the outline of the coasts for an overlay?

A bit of background as to why I ask. I recently lost all my GIMP files in a computer crash. A terrible tragedy. Thankfully, I had saved my finished maps off on to an external drive but not the GIMP files which contained all the layer information. I only have the .JPG files I exported from GIMP. My next project was to be a political overlay for the various countries to show how the land was divided up amongst the country's ruling families. I could hand draw the coastlines but the result would be far sloppier than I would like. It would be best if I could somehow copy only the outline of the continents to a new layer so that I might use them in my overlay.

Thank you all for your time.

[johnvanvliet]

for that above image i would select the water with the select tool ( NOT the wand )

the wand selects ONLY continues areas

but the water needs fixing first

remove the black dotted lines and things

[Durakken]

You might have problems with that as the water is green and blue rather than a solid color.

[johnvanvliet]

use a 20% fuzzy on it

[BISHDP]

Thank you very much. It worked rather well. I had to massage it a bit to turn out as I wished but I think it came out quite well. Sadly, as I do not have the original layers for the map, I had to work around the existing labels.

[johnvanvliet]

Gimp 2.8.16 ( the current )
if you use the DEFAULT " < control > + < s > "
it saves as a gimp xcf image with all the layers intact

you have to "Export" it now to save a image as a different format

[BISHDP]

I think you misunderstood me. I had the GIMP files before, with all the layers intact. I lost them in a drive failure. Now all I have are the exported .JPGs of the maps. I can make new layers in GIMP but the base map will always be one layer.