Escape from the pixel background using Gimp

Pretty nice looking and simple to create effect, where we turn everything into pixels except the selected part. My car will end up looking like it's trying to escape out of the pixelated background.

Open an image you want partly to pixelaze in Gimp.

I'm going to turn into pixels everything except the front part of this classic looking Porsche 911 I found here.

Click the Toggle Quick Mask (Shift + Q for the keyboard shortcut) button to turn the mask on.

Your document should now turn red as we applied a mask.

Choose the Paintbrush Tool.

Press D and then X to set the white background.

Choose a Hardness 050 brush and set an appropriate brush size for your object.

Now start uncovering the mask by painting the part of your object that you don't want it to be pixelated.

If you uncovered a bit more of the object as needed, simply press X key to set the black color and pain over the area you want to cover again.

Remember: white color is for uncovering the mask and black color for covering the mask.

This is how my half uncovered Porsche looks like.

Now press Shift + Q or press the Toggle Mask button to turn the mask off.

You should now end up with the selection of the area you uncovered in the previous steps.

Press Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V to copy and paste the selection.

Right-click the new Floating Selection "layer" and choose To New Layer (see picture).

Now choose the original layer again.

In the menu click Filters, Blur and choose Pixelize...

Set the Pixel width and Pixel height to about 5 to 8 and click OK.

We are almost done.

In the menu click Colors and choose Hue-Saturation...

Boost the Saturation up a bit and click OK.

We made the background a bit more old computer 8-bit graphic like

And that's it.

And the close-up.