I have a small image that I want to fade out so it can be used behind text in a Word document without making the text difficult to read.

I have been trying to accomplish this w/ Gimp for the past hour and the closes I've come is a gray and darker gray checkerboard that bears no resemblance whatsoever to my image.

I could do this in two minutes with MS PhotoDraw (oh how I rue the day I switched to Ubuntu) and have discovered a half dozen explanations of different ways to do this with GIMP, none of which work at all. I just get checkerboards.

Can anyone explain to me how to get my image to be faded out? There are no layers, just one, single picture. And I want it to be a .gif, .jpg, or .png (I don't care which) of the original that's faded out and can be pasted into a word document. Can anyone explain, step-by-step how to do this, indicating exactly what I click on, et cetera?

I know that you people who know these things have better things to do with your time than help people who don't, but it'd sure be appreciated.