Remove Image Background

Cutting a person, pet or product out of a photo used to mean careful work with selection tools. A segmentation model can now do it in seconds by recognizing what is foreground and what is background. This tool runs such a model directly in your browser, so you get a clean cut-out without uploading the photo to a cloud service.

How the cut-out is made

The page uses ISNet, a published model trained to separate salient objects from their surroundings. Your photo is scaled to 1024 × 1024 pixels for the model, which produces a mask: white where the subject is, black where the background is, and gray along soft edges such as hair. That mask is then scaled smoothly back to the full size of your original and used to separate the subject. The computation runs in a background worker with ONNX Runtime, so the page stays responsive.

The one-time download

The model file is about 46 MB. It is downloaded from this site the first time you use the tool and then cached by your browser, so later visits start much faster. On a phone with mobile data, run the first cut-out on Wi-Fi.

Choosing the new background

Transparent produces a PNG with an empty background, ready for designs, slides and shop listings. White gives the clean look most marketplaces want for product photos. Color lets you pick any solid color, useful for profile pictures or brand graphics. Blurred places the subject in front of a softly blurred copy of the original scene, imitating the shallow depth of field of a portrait lens.

Refining the edges

“Edge sharpness” makes the transition between subject and background softer or crisper. Soft edges suit hair and fur, sharp edges suit products with clean outlines. “Shrink or grow the cut-out” moves the boundary inward or outward. Shrinking removes thin halos of the old background; growing restores parts of the subject that were trimmed too tightly. “Show the mask” displays the mask itself in black and white, which makes small mistakes easy to spot.

Photos that work best

Clear subjects in front of a distinguishable background give the best results: a person against a wall, a product on a table, a pet on grass, a car on a street. Difficult cases include subjects that share the background’s color, glass and transparent objects, very fine flyaway hair against a busy scene, and groups where it is unclear what the main subject is.

Getting the most out of a cut-out

Use a reasonably large, sharp photo; detail helps the mask follow the outline. For products, a plain surface and even lighting make the edges nearly perfect. If a stray area remains, crop it away first with Crop Image and run the tool again.

Privacy

Photos of people, children, homes and unreleased products stay on your device. Nothing but the model file is transferred.

Related tools

For logos and graphics on a plain color, the Transparent Background Maker removes one color precisely without AI. To place the cut-out on new scenery, use the Collage Maker or the Photo Editor.